An Englishman rambling on an Irish ramble!

Date Published: 28-Feb-2013

This morning I walked on melting frost in late Winter chill, under early Spring blue skies. The higher sun pours scorn on these late season freezes, while pregnant buds struggle to survive.

But they will. They’ll survive, as will we all, emerging from the darkness into the light, breathing collective sighs of relief that we made it through.

Even though this cold dry air grips me by the gonads, I’ll take it every time over endless wind and rain. Winter in the West of Ireland offers fantastic colours, moments of perfect silence and festive mayhem, but as the months go by we feel more and more beaten up by the weather.

Hunkered down into our coats, we dip our chins toward the ground, denying ourselves the chance of human contact. We walk hunched, subservient to the storms, like a defeated army in a war with weather.

Having lived in much warmer climes, I’m always surprised how much I love the climate in Connacht. Yes, the rain can bring me down, but then I call it ‘good writing weather’ and it serves me well. Yes, my heart sinks when I see RTE TV’s weather forecaster telling me in July that “Tomorrow it might even go as high as 20?C!”

As high as 20? What am I doing living here?

But I know. I know why I’m here. I’m here because I love it. Warmer climes are all very well, but here there are no forest fires. The ground doesn’t suddenly quake under my feet. There might be the odd mudslide and a fair bit of flooding but there aren’t the country-wide catastrophes that exist elsewhere.

For 300 days a year we live with sunshine and showers and temperatures that dwell between 10?C and 20?C. It’s all very moderate, temperate as meteorological types would have it, and that’s fine. When I lived in Northern California, not a dribble of rain fell on my village from May to November, and when those first drops finally fell, this mad Englishman was to be seen dancing loopy in the street with joy.

There’s truth in what the auld fella on Dominick Street told me many years ago. We were sheltering in a shopfront, watching Galway’s notorious sideways rain fly past us up the road, and he turned to me and said.

“God’s gift to Ireland, the rain! Without the rain there’d be hotels on every cliff top and not an empty beach to walk.”

A man after my own heart.

Yes I love it here, and today the sun kisses my cheeks with the promise of warmth to come. Turning onto the bog road, my mind drifts naturally to politics. For me, observing Irish politics is like watching a repeat of the English version from 20 years ago. It was painful to live through another construction-driven boom and bust, because I’d seen that deadly cocktail of greed and house prices in Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s.

Frustration rose in me recently as I watched those late night Dáil sessions, because I was witnessing a political act that created a cultural change which will serve this country ill.

In the past you used to hide your money under the mattress so that your English overlords could not rob your children’s inheritance. Now you’ve swept your debts under the carpet to hide it from your European overlords, forcing your children to live their adult lives in debt.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.