Rainfall in Dublin has gone beyond a joke

Now I fully appreciate that much of this article is not going to attract sympathy. Sympathy only goes to the deserving, so appealing for even a little of it for the poor rain-sodden residents of the east coast will not attract a lot of likes from most readers of this article, or indeed from western-based posters on Facebook. No indeed.

If there are spare umbrellas in Connacht, I am not sure there would be much support to airlift them to Dublin in a humanitarian gesture. There would be many dry eyes in western houses if you tried to sell them that one.

But these are strange times, so who knows what might happen. Since the start of January, the east coast has been battered by rain with an intensity and frequency I don’t recall in all my years up here. And that is a lot of years.

For weeks, it just hasn’t stopped. It has been relentless. On top of that, it has been dark and gloomy, even on those rare days when there hasn’t been much rain. No light, and all wet. The flooding that so many places on the east coast have experienced has of course been the worst of it. Anyone who has experienced that - wherever they may be - will get sympathy from all. It’s an awful thing to happen.

But even on the milder end of the experience, it has been a tough few weeks. Everywhere the ground is completely… what’s the word, saturated. Yes. that is the only way to describe it.

The weather over the last few weeks in the east has attracted all the stock terms and clichés that have been used to describe the rain in the west for donkey’s years. Ferocious. Relentless. Downpours. And yes, saturated. Those terms have been casually used about the rain in the west of Ireland forever. In Dublin, those terms have hardly ever been used to describe the rain and its impact, until now.

Because it does indeed - normally - rain a lot less in Dublin. Yes, it does. A lot less, whatever those who have lived there all their lives may think.

Now I appreciate that this is a sensitive topic. Those of us from the west who are living or have lived in Dublin don’t like rubbing it in, or becoming unpopular, so we don’t say it much about it when we are around to visit. The wise among us don’t anyway. Because we have all heard the person who says ‘as soon as I hit the west the rain falls’. The observation might be true, but it ain’t wise.

So if anyone at home asks you about the weather in Dublin, you shrug your shoulders and mumble about how nice it is to be home. If they press you, you say the city is all built up and so you don’t notice it as much one way or the other. They know, you know, but honour and politeness is preserved.

But when a person from the west moves to Dublin, after about two weeks, they will come up to you, look up at the sky, and whisper at you, ‘it’s true’. Even saying it feels a bit unkind to home, but it is hard to ignore when you walk out the door most days and don’t worry about an umbrella.

That has been true for a long time. The Vikings knew it. They had figured out that where they built Dublin is one of the driest places in Ireland. How they figured that out is one for the history scholars, but they did. So whether in plundering or in forecasting, there were few better than the Vikings - they knew all the good spots.

That divide in rainfall even divides Dublin, with the south side of the city getting even less rain than the northside. This confirms of course that the Vikings and the Dublin middle classes have many things in common.

So of course I fully appreciate that tears for Dublin about this matter will not of course fall like rain. Readers in the west will cast their eyes skyward when they hear all the talk about bad weather when it impacts the east coast, and wonder at the drought of talk when it hits the west. This aspect of life is as certain as showers.

But all that aside, the weather is strange. What has caused it is something that we all - wherever we live - have to reflect on. The damage done to people’s homes and businesses by flooding, or even the threat of it, is catastrophic. What it all means for where and how we build and live and work is an enormous - and very expensive - question. Some people will say the changes are natural and not caused by human activities. For those who say climate change isn’t happening, ask yourself why Donald Trump was so keen to get hold of Greenland. Was it because of all the ice or because it is melting?

Water dripping everywhere has certainly been the experience on the east coast these last few weeks. And of course there are studies that show lots of complicated and important things about the patterns of rain and weather and what it all means, but really all we have had to do is look around. The infrastructure we have used for decades to get us through the winter and the annual rains has started to seriously fray and degrade in response to this weather - you can see the effects on roads in the city and fields in the country. We have a deadly plant called hemlock water-dropwort being washed up rivers onto beaches on the east coast.

There might be some craic in reflecting on the poor Dubliners complaining about a bit of rain, but there is no craic in these changed weather patterns. No one in the west needs reminding what it was like when the brunt of Storm Éowyn hit the west. The weather is changing, climate change is real, and in response, all the umbrellas in the world won’t keep the consequences off our heads, wherever in Ireland those heads are to be found.