The view out the window in Margaret and Jim’s B&B is sublime. If only we could see it. There is an exceptional cruelty in knowing west Cork is out there in all its splendour with its ribbons of strands and sea cliffs sculpted sharper than Cillian Murphy’s cheekbones but barely a glimpse of it to be got through the thick curtain of rain. At breakfast, the tourist at the next table says it was 36 degrees when she left her home in Bavaria for her sixth holiday in Ireland. This year, she is doing three-quarters of the Wild Atlantic Way. It has poured rain the whole way since Galway. “The people are great,” she says, grimacing at the drizzle-smeared window, “but I couldn’t live here. This weather!”
In the evening, as the dregs of a hurricane whistle around the chimney pot, we sit beside the blazing fire in Denis Nolan’s pub and Google “sunniest holiday destinations”. The following morning, one of the heavy flower urns outside the B&B lies dashed to the ground by the still howling wind. The beaches remain closed to swimmers because monster waves keep coming ashore with frothing fury. A full-blown storm called Irene is due with today’s arrivals.
What a truly lousy summer it has been. To even call it summer is a corruption of the English language. It’s been chilly, windy and rainy but worst of all has been the absence of summer-wattage sunlight. The country has huddled under a roof of dirty-grey skies and sobbing clouds. Colour stripped from the season of buckets and spades. Shop rails of T-shirts and shorts in soul-nourishing oranges and lemons never made it beyond the door. If Ireland has 40 shades of green, it has 50 shades of grey.
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This lack of sunshine is going to cost us in the winter when depleted levels of vitamin D will have bone-creaking queues out the GPs’ doors. There are already signs of early-onset SAD (seasonal affective disorder) cases after months of rain seeping in under our skin to drown our minds. When you have spent the long nights of winter looking forward to the summer and it doesn’t come, the feeling of being cheated runs deep. As does the despair that, maybe, this is the way it is going to be forever more.
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After decades of warnings that climate damage would melt the ice-caps and burn the forests, bring droughts and heatwaves, turn green pastures into deserts and make tropical islands disappear, we never anticipated what the weather turmoil was going to do to the Irish psyche. Broken summer dreams will have their collateral damage for the national psychology. After the long disappointment will come winter, and novenas that next year won’t be another washout. How are we to capture the memories that are supposed to sustain us between now and the spring after a summer of protracted sensory deprivation? The taste of the sea’s salt on our lips, the warmth of sunshine on our skin, the whiff of barbecues and of the tar melting on the road, the June nights when the moon is only brushing its teeth for bedtime when the sun is up and out again. Will those days ever come back, or is this our lot now on this patch of our perishing planet?
Before this excuse for a summer, it might have been gratifying to ditch plastic bin liners and take the bus instead of the car in the hope it might help those unfortunates Somewhere Over There scourged by scorching temperatures and typhoons. Now it’s on Ireland’s doorstep. Our seasons have gone haywire. September is the new July. Christmas can be positively balmy. The Gulf Stream that once bathed our shores in mildness has turned into a giant sunblock that Ambre Solaire could bottle and sell.
These patterns of wetter summers and warmer winters are exactly what climate experts have been predicting for Ireland. While we’ve been talking-about-talking-about building flood defences, diversifying agriculture and creating a reliable, sustainable public transport service, climate change has come in the back door and is smack in our midst. Image has piled upon image, in recent years, of householders paddling canoes along flooded streets to escape from their deluged homes, and electricians aloft poles the morning after the latest storm working to restore power. It was poor consolation to the people surveying their 680 damaged buildings in Midleton last October to learn that it could have been much worse had the tide been high. As walls of sandbags stretched along the Wild Atlantic Way this summer-that-never was, Mary Robinson, our climate-crier-in-chief, called for a new tax on business air travel, much of which is needless in the age of Zoom. She might have been whispering in the face of Storm Irene for all the attention her proposal has got.
And yet this is a country obsessed with weather. We have more indicators of incoming rain than Spain has mañanas. If the cows are lying down in the fields, it’s going to rain. If the smoke rises at an angle from the chimney, it’s going to rain. If the seagulls fly inland, it’s going to rain. If the mountains move closer, it’s going to rain. Weather is the mainstay of the national conversation. We’re all talk, and no action.
The tourist from Bavaria had the impression that the people of Ireland were genetically equipped to cope with the climate’s head-wrecking dreariness. She meant “the craic”. Various northern European countries have their bespoke lifestyle philosophies for enduring the prolonged absence of sunlight. The Danes have hygge. The Swedes have lagom. The Finns have kalsarikännit, which translates as “pants drunk”, a similar concept to craic’s “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die”. Fatalism is the key. Sure what can you do? Pseudo-analysis has another word for it: denial.
On checkout day, Margaret emerges from the kitchen to say goodbye. “Ye’ve been lucky enough with the weather,” she says, with a straight face. Driving away, the windscreen wipers going full pelt, we laugh. Sure what can you do?