OUR neighbours across the Irish Sea are seriously worried these days. Their concern is not the prospect of a change of government, nor any unseemly frolics by the aristocracy, nor even the performance of the national cricket team.
The problem is that the last two years have been the driest in England since reliable records began over 200 years ago. The rivers are drying up, and the prospect of hose-pipe bans and water shortages casts a pall of gloom over a nation of enthusiastic gardeners and washers of family cars.
Of course, epidemics of dryness have indeed had horrendous consequences in the past. History is littered with tales of major cities that disappeared mainly because they ran out of water, and even the fall of the Roman Empire has been ascribed by some authorities to a gradual decline in rainfall in southern Europe during the first millennium.
But, how have we in Ireland been affected by nature's apparent reluctance to turn on the tap? The answer, it seems, is very little.
We remember 1995, for example, for its long, hot, glorious summer, and there was indeed very little rainfall that year from April until September. But that long, dry period followed one of the wettest winters on record, and a spring that brought devastating floods to Gort and other places in the west of Ireland. Our normal rainfall quota for the year was comfortably met.
Last year, 1996, was less dramatic in its contrasts, but the rainfall balance for the year as a whole was again adequately maintained by a very wet spring, particularly in the southern half of the country. The rain this time, you may remember, fell mainly on Clonmel.
The pattern so far in 1997 continues to be erratic. The year began anomalously with less than half the normal January rainfall. Met Eireann, playing host to several dozen world-class scientists at Shannon, expensively equipped to gather data on Atlantic storms, was somewhat embarrassed when not a single January storm appeared.
But February provided compensation in abundance: it was the wettest and windiest February for many years, and provided as much rain and as many storms as anyone might wish. But then March again was very dry, the driest for over 20 years.
The picture here in Ireland, then, is one where the total rainfall figures seem to be holding pretty well, and insofar as anything unusual may be happening to our weather, it is that most of our rain has been falling during short, very wet periods, with long relatively dry spells in between.
The question arises whether this represents a significant change in our environment. Has global warming begun to exert its influence by changing the normal patterns of our weather?
As far as meteorologists can tell, there is no reason to believe that this is so. Any apparent anomalies in rainfall can be easily explained as normal features of our highly variable climate, and it would be rash to ascribe them to any suspected long-term change, still less to any possible human influence on the enhanced greenhouse effect.
Rainfall, after all, varies considerably over the decades in any given locality without any help from global warming. To put the matter in perspective, we have only to remember the "dust-bowl" in the US during the 1930s.
At that time a predominance of westerly winds left the Great Plains in the persistent rain shadow of the Rockies for several years, and the drop in rainfall had terrible consequence for the agricultural communities of the Midwest. But a few years later, normal weather patterns returned.
In the same way, there is no reason, as yet, to suppose that any unusual experiences we may be having at present on this side of the Atlantic are a sign of permanent or catastrophic change.