Die Politik, said Bismarck, ist keine exakte Wissenschaft: "Politics is not an exact science." Few would disagree in principle, but there are those who believe that the inexactitude can be reduced with a little meteorology, as evidenced, for example, by the daily habits of the 18th-century raconteur, Matthew Green:
Or to some coffee house I stray
For news, the manna of a day
And from the hipp'd discourses gather
That politics go by the weather.
Tradition and ordinary common sense agree that good weather favours a high turnout on polling day, although everyone has their own ideas as to who will benefit.
In the British general election, for example, many would argue that the doughty, archetypal Tory voter is more dedicated and more likely to brave unpleasant elements to vote than is his Labour counterpart; a fortiori since the former is the underdog.
Similarly, here in Ireland it often seems that the typical No voter is a more determined creature than his counterpart who nods in the affirmative. If this be so, it follows that Labour's chances in the UK, and the prospects for the Yes campaign in Ireland, should draw advantage from a summertime vote. Was it wise to have chosen Thursday as the polling day? Several studies carried out in Britain have examined the total number of hours during which rain fell between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. on each of the seven weekdays over periods as long as 40 years. They found that, on average, Saturday is the wettest day of the week. It is followed, in order of wetness, by Thursday, Tuesday, Friday, Sunday, Monday and Wednesday.
Statistically, therefore, Labour might have been wiser to hold the election on a Sunday. Here in Ireland, in the unlikely event of these conclusions being transferable, a better Yes-result might be expected, weatherwise, on a Friday than on the usual Thursday.
Sceptical meteorologists, of course, would point out that if you separate the rainfall figures for any given period into seven lots corresponding to the weekdays, the totals will never coincide exactly; one of the seven days must inevitably turn out to be the wettest, and another to be the day on which the least amount of rain has fallen.
What matters is whether the difference turns out to be "statistically significant", and there is no evidence that this is so. And in any event, by the time you read today's "Weather Eye", you will know precisely what this Thursday's weather has turned out to be.