An Irishman's Diary

FINE GAEL TD Shane McEntee was on radio yesterday complaining about the Government’s tardiness in salting icy roads: apropos of which he said this about the Ministers for Transport and the Environment: “They’re like polar bears – they’ve gone into hibernation”.

At the risk of being pedantic, I feel bound to point out to Mr McEntee that polar bears do not hibernate. Not in the strict sense, anyway. Alright, if they happen to be female and pregnant (and whatever else the Ministers for Transport and the Environment can be accused of, they’re surely innocent on both these counts), they undergo a kind-of hibernation: lying low through the winter months in snow-covered dens.

But even then, it’s not the real thing: because, unlike hibernating animals, expectant polar bears need to keep their body temperatures close to normal throughout this period, for the sake of their cubs. As for male and unexpectant female bears, the most they do is a kind of “walking hibernation”, maintaining normal temperatures and instead saving energy by adjusting metabolic activity.

I realise I may be labouring the point here, but Mr McEntee’s Cabinet Minister/polar bear metaphor also falls down badly on another score. As everyone knows, polar bears are under threat because of melting ice.

Whereas, in his estimation, the aforementioned Ministers are under threat (or should be) because of their failure to melt it.

I’m just saying.

I ACCEPT the FG man’s general point, however. Which, typical Opposition opportunism in blaming the Government for bad weather aside, is that it is remarkable how conditions that in many countries would be considered mild can, in this one, bring everything to an overnight halt.

It is only by etymological accident that the Latin name for Ireland – Hibernia – is closely linked with the concept of hibernation. Whatever the Romans thought, this is no more “the land of winter” than Greenland is the Emerald Isle. But at times like this, the coincidence does not seem inapt.

A sense of fatalism, indeed helplessness, about the weather is one of Ireland’s more enduring national characteristics. Never mind the current cold spell, which is at least unusual. The truth is we have never fully reconciled ourselves even to the fact that it rains a lot here and that we should dress accordingly.

After a few consecutive dry days in summer, we feel personally betrayed when it turns wet again. “Typical!” we mutter in disgust. And typical is what it is. Yet we never truly accept this fact. Chances are we didn’t own any proper rain gear to start with; but we often have to go out and buy a new umbrella (I do, anyway), having lost the last one amid crazed optimism about the apparent mediterraneanisation of the climate.

Maybe this explains the current popularity of the notion, about which a letter writer complained here the other day – that the cold spell has made driving conditions everywhere “treacherous”. There are plenty of colourful synonyms for “bad” or “dangerous”. But no, we always have to infer treachery on the part of the elements, or the roads, or both.

The vague implication is that we are the innocent victims of a deliberate conspiracy, beyond our control; and that we have no choice but to lie low until the perpetrators – including the dastardly Jack Frost himself – are arrested and brought to justice.

ON THE other hand, there are few things more annoying than having to listen to smug expatriates, returned for Christmas from Lapland or Minnesota, telling us how efficiently local authorities there deal with the snow and ice that arises, with utter predictability, every year.

The fact that the recent conditions here are evoking comparison with 1963 and 1947 says it all. A local authority official who bought in large supplies of salt and grit a few years ago, to have in reserve, would probably have qualified for the same praise that was showered on those heroic IT managers who, in 1999, spent fortunes saving us from the Y2K bug.

A certain amount of surprise at our subarctic winter is surely justified. In which vein, I have to admit that, until recent days, I did not realise that Ireland – or Northern Ireland anyway – had a salt mine. This although Louis MacNeice, who spent formative years in “the most Protestant town in Ireland” – Carrickfergus – adverts to the phenomenon in one of his poems.

Contrasting his English schooling with his childhood in war-time Carrick, he wrote of being “Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt mines/And the soldiers with their guns.” Elsewhere in the same piece, he even rhymed “salt” with “halt”, although not as a comment about treacherous driving conditions.

Here’s what he wrote: “The little boats beneath the Norman castle/The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;/The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses/But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.”

So it’s good to hear that representatives of the local authorities have been sent to the salt mines lately. But I’m glad it’s only to collect supplies. Anything more permanent would have been a bit harsh.