A real Spring in our step as Summer Time calls around

Country Living with Francis Farragher

We really haven’t had too much to complain about this Winter despite all the clouds of doom and gloom that hang drearily over any talk of our weather or climate. Apart from the first two-and-a-half weeks of March which brought us a lot of rain – our wettest month since January, 2018 – the Winter season gone by had a very benign hue about it.

There were no snowfalls of any note (well at least in our neck of the woods); we avoided any extremes of cold in terms of sharp frosts; while our drier run of weather that began in the early-Summer of 2018 stayed with us right through until the early days of March.

Back the years, an old friend of mine the late Frank Gaffney from Galway (Sligo originally) – an erudite man and especially on all things weather – would sometimes gently berate me, for complaining too much about our so-called ‘bad weather’.

He would always point out that Ireland with its mid-northern latitude location and its location on the eastern fringe of the Atlantic Ocean, meant that in general we avoided the catastrophic weather events that can leave such a trail of destruction behind them.

His words resonated a lot with me over the past couple of weeks as the pictures and news reports filtered through of the trail of destruction left behind along the south-eastern fringe of Africa where Cyclone Idai struck with such a vengeance on March 14/15 last.

Cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes are really ‘all the one’ in terms of weather events deriving their huge energy and vast reservoirs of rainfall from the combined impact of great heat and the availability of warm ocean waters.

In the case of Idai, the waters of the Indian Ocean and tropical heat make this their Autumn storm season (Southern Hemisphere), but the scale of the death and destruction has been truly disturbing.

Idai tore through Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe with absolute vengeance leaving an estimated death toll of up to 1,000, many thousands more injured, and impacting overall on about 2.6 million people.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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