Like the clouds framing our lack of a discernable summer, we burst with depression and ennui, writes Anne-Marie Hourihane
SUMMER IS like Christmas: deep down, we all expect to enjoy it. No matter how rational we pretend to be, we all know that it is somehow our duty to be having a good time. A time of family get-togethers and communal feasting, of romance perhaps - or at the very least of leisurely sunsets. Summer is literally the season of goodwill. Or that's how it is supposed to be.
The weather is now a serious issue. It is possible to forget the economy for quite long spells, as long as you haven't lost your job or your pension. The health service doesn't bear thinking about, and we all gave up trying a couple of years ago.
The fact that one-fifth of our population is functionally illiterate is neither here nor there, as long as we can see that the nation's children are reasonably happy - sure they haven't marched on the Dáil yet, have they? And everyone seems to be doing their damnedest to forget about the whole Lisbon thing - no offence.
But the weather is really serious. This summer has felt like the end of the world. The air is filled with the sound of grown-ups laughing manically in holiday cottages. Ireland's beaches, famed in song and story (although it's hard to think of a single Irish song about a beach - the weather must have been terrible in traditional times ) are empty. News is coming in from the holiday resorts of Ireland, and it has to be said it isn't pretty.
It is not that your average Irish holidaymaker feels sorry for the owners of our BBs or small hotels. On the contrary, the attitude of your average holidaymaker to these fine people, the backbone of our much-vaunted tourist industry, is that it is bloody well good enough for them. That, in some ways, this weather is karmic retribution for inflicting upon us all, for far too long, the freezing wooden floor and the terra cotta curtain.
Who among us can ever forget the bone-freezing chill of an Irish BB on a summer's evening? Or the crypt-like silence of the breakfast room, where the cornflakes sit limply in their huge Pyrex bowls and the orange juice has separated in its cavernous jug? All that, and the prices as well.
So we don't feel much sympathy for the proprietors, however deserving they may really be. But it is kind of depressing to be standing on a rural quayside in your anorak, as I was recently, and to be told by a local person: "This place is normally black with children."
We gazed together at the empty vastness of the coastline, and thought of all the missing children who were at that moment eating chips somewhere on the Mediterranean, or perhaps in Florida.
Personally I am not a great sun-lover, but the thing about this summer is that it has been so cold, as well as so wet.
It is not healthy for our citizens to have to wade their way to work, and then to wade their way home again.
The fact that the streets of Dublin are refreshingly deserted and traffic-free, as they are every August, is no compensation for the fact that they are also regularly flooded. It seems a long time since we saw that most heartening of sights in the summer city, hordes of drinkers standing outside the pubs in their shirtsleeves, drinking on the pavement. If we were lucky enough to see it now I'm sure our eyes would fill with tears.
But it is on the domestic front that the price of this summer is being paid. You could say that tempers are beginning to fray, but in fact they started to fray eight weeks ago. Tempers are not so much frayed as completely unravelled.
People who took their holidays in a foreign country back in June have now had those happy memories washed from their brains and are cranky. People who are due to take their holidays in September have now reached the point of no return. This is not a recipe for conjugal happiness.
The one group of people who have done well out of this summer are the returning emigrants, and we are not talking here about all those Polish people who are setting off for their native country with barely a backward glance. We are talking about Ireland's sons and daughters who come home once a year to be reunited with their loved ones, to return to the haunts of their childhood.
Normally these trips end with tear-stained goodbyes as our returned emigrants embrace exile once again. Now they are counting the days before they can fly back to a country in which you can tell day from night. They can't get out of the place fast enough.
And of course the rest of us can't get out of it fast enough either. When, next year, we look at the rocketing emigration statistics, they will be attributed to the economic downturn, but we will know that it was the weather that sent a new generation abroad. The rest of us will simply be left with our resolution never to holiday in Ireland again. Never. Never. Never. Never.