The old saying was that if the Dutch lived in Ireland, they'd feed the world; and if the Irish lived in Holland, they'd drown. But with the modern Irish state we don't even have to go to Holland to be overwhelmed by water. We manage that perfectly well at home.
How is this possible? How is it that every year, a vast rain-storm is photographed by satellite as it forms out in the Atlantic and is carefully tracked as it moves towards Ireland, where with utter predictability, it unloads billions of tons of water: and each year, unfailingly, the state is taken completely by surprise by the floods which result?
This year, just to provide piquant proof of this culture of pathological improvidence, the Minister for Finance actually announced the abolition of the Emergency Flood Fund - because, of course, floods are a thing of the past - standing shin-deep in water, with his trousers rolled up around his knees.
This is like the Norwegian Minister for Finance announcing that Norway is to get rid of the snow-plough fund, because the state has abolished snow. And then of course some strange white stuff starts to fall from the skies.
"Vot could it be, Nils - ice-cream?"
"No, Edvard, you never get this much ice-cream: look, there are tjons and tjons of, bljocking all the roads, and we have just got rid of our bljinking snow pljoughs."
"Vot, Nils, dis is snow?"
"Ja, Edvard, this is snow."
"Oh blahdy hell, Nils, we're fjocked now."
Yup, Edvard, fjocked just about sums it up.
Strange orb in sky
Even Zimbabwe is not as surprised by its weather as we are. Flunkeys do not approach His Barking Highness, Jesus Mohammad Buddha Mugabe with the news that something mysteriously white and hot has appeared in an otherwise blue sky.
The Saviour of Mankind goes to his window, and sure enough, pouring its thermonuclear energies on all of Zimbabwe, is this strange, distant hot thing. "Where did that come from?" asks Robert.
"Haven't got a clue mate, took me quite by surprise," says his Minister for Weather. "Haven't even got a name for it. But, tell you what, shall we call it "sun" just for the time being?"
We don't live near the Arctic circle or the Equator. We live in one of the wettest meridians in the world. We don't get serious snowfalls on this island of ours, and we don't get blazing sunshine and drought. We get rain, lots of it, year after year after year: and year after predictable year, we are taken completely by surprise when the rains arrive.
So, yearly, the Taoiseach goes down to his constituency to examine the amazing and wholly unexpected floods at first hand, where is photographed showing his glum astonishment that this inexplicable mystery has occurred.
Naturally, because these annual floods are annually unprecedented, he has never announced that the Government is preparing a special emergency plan, for immediate implementation whenever the weather service foresees even the possibility of heavy rains.
The failure of the State to act last Thursday was a true scandal. But it was precisely the same as the failure in almost identical circumstances both last year and two years ago.
Given that we know the consequences of the rainfall that invariably comes in late October-early November, the entire resources of the Garda Siochána should have been deployed, the instant it became clear that floods were a possibility, with the Army, the FCA and the Civil Defence mobilised, all working to a plan which had been carefully worked out and rehearsed, many times over.
What actually happened was that most of An Garda Siochána stayed in their stations or at home, the army remained in its nice warm barracks, the FCA and the Civil Defence were not called up, and the State's official response came in a single magisterial gesture late in the day: the bus-lanes, which had long since vanished beneath the waves, were declared open to ordinary traffic.
And that was it.That was how the Irish State responded to the effective closure of the capital city and suburbs by rainfall: bus-lanes were opened to cars. In witless futility, this even exceeds the old cliché of the band playing on the deck of the Titanic; for at least the band possibly gave comfort to the doomed.
A modern State?
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of unfortunates remained trapped in their cars for hours on end, with absolutely no sign at all that they lived in a modern state which takes precautions against natural disasters.Which is fair enough, because they do not live in a State which takes precautions against natural disasters. They live in a State which is so institutionally imbecilic that it is astonished by the annual return of bad weather, as if its memory cycle only reaches back six months: yes, we all remember back to last May, but nope, sorry, what happened before then?
Or maybe it's not memory, but simply peasant resignation, the belief that we can do absolutely nothing about natural disasters except let them pass. And so the institutions of the Irish state simply behaved as peasants invariably do when bad weather arrives: they stayed in bed.
Either way, whether it is group-stupidity or peasant-inertia, we must conclude that this failure to prepare for the utterly predictable is a defining characteristic of Irishness: and this time next year, an astonished Taoiseach will be gazing dolefully at floods, to which the State responds by declaring that bus-lanes, three feet under water, are once again open to ordinary traffic.