A kind May but is our luck about to change

Country Living with Francis Farragher

IT does only seem like yesterday when we were dusting ourselves down after the Christmas season and then preparing for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade but almost in a flash we’re within a stone’s throw of Mid-Summer’s Day. Now the ‘Mayos’ are coming to town on Sunday with all their colour, bluster and football passion, the city will be a hectic place this weekend and already there’s a holiday feel to the place with talk of the Arts Festival and the Galway Races.

Weather wise, it’s been a pleasant enough journey since last October as overall, we enjoyed quite a mild and dryish eight months of weather with thankfully no flooding stories to report on. However, given the inevitable cycle of weather patterns, that will all change too, but up until this week at least, a time to enjoy our good times.

We really did get some pounding at the end of 2015 when the November and December of that year, brought us well over 500mms. or 20 inches of rainfall, as recorded at the Met Éireann station in Athenry.

Some people maintain that we get the same amount of rainfall every year but that’s not the case. While our average annual rainfall here in Galway might come in around the 1,200mms. mark (c. 47 inches), in 2015 the total for the year was 1,575mms. (Athenry) or 62 inches while in 2016 that figure was down to 1074mms. or just over 42 inches.

That dry trend has continued through 2017 for all months with the exception of a wet March, and so far, through the first five months of the year, the rainfall total in Athenry has been under 400mms. or 14 inches. If this trend continued, we would be in line for one of our driest ever years, but that is really tempting fate, and if we get washed out over the coming Summer, I won’t be thanked for such prediction.

As well as being local, weather does tend to be about the present tense, and if for example, we do go on to have a wash-out of a Summer, then very few people will tend to remember the dry Winter and Spring we had before that.

The longevity of our dry spell has of course brought its own problems with reservoir levels very low in many parts of the country, while in places like the Aran Islands, there are currently severe water shortages. Much and all as we complain about the rain, without it, we are in very serious trouble, and if it stayed dry for too long, our green little isle would be green no more.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.