Twenty inches of water have glugged into the rain-gauge in my Mayo garden since the end of October - about twice the average. As the hill-stream rushes, churning and roaring, to the sea, I'm glad I don't live in a place where water has nowhere to go - somewhere like, say, the Shannon floodplain.

Over Christmas, here on the west coast, we braced ourselves for the same weight of storms that hit last year - or even worse: the Government's present of a millennium candle seemed timely. But the storms swerved south of their usual Atlantic track and caused appalling devastation in France and beyond.

Shrieking up to 125 m.p.h., they smashed 270 million trees, blew spires off the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris and killed 87 people. It was, as French weather experts agreed, un phenomene historique. News editors in Ireland and Britain, however, decided to run day after day with the customary Christmas hijacking in foreign parts. And in Paris on New Year's Eve, fallen trees were dragged out of the way to let the world see the Eiffel Tower as a giant millennial sparkler.

How much longer can we live with this tacit denial of the impact of global warming? How could the poor flooded families around the Shannon not make the connection between their plight and the mud-slides of Venezuela? Was it because, in all the media coverage of that horror (at least that I saw), the words global warming were never mentioned?

One of the rewards of keeping rain records for Met Eireann is to receive its Monthly Weather Bulletin. The latest issue carries news of a hurricane simulation study by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - America's national weather service.

It begins: "The strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense storms over the next century as the earth's climate is warmed", and goes on to discuss the merit of more reliable prediction. For instance, people are more likely to take hurricane warnings more seriously if the weather people don't cry wolf too often.

Watching Evelyn and Gerald perform on RTE, I have been touched by their need to warn us of damaging gusts without scaring the daylights out of us.

THERE is a difference between crying wolf and not even acknowledging that wolves are around. Ten years ago, in a remarkably prompt response to the scientific warnings of climate change, the Government published a volume of expert studies on the implications for Ireland, edited by Brendan McWilliams.

It put particular stress on the impact of storm-surges at the coast. Even with a slight sea-level rise, it concluded, an event which in 1990 might be expected to occur once every 100 years, might by the year 2030, given the projected changes, be expected to occur every five years.

Well over a million people live on or near the Irish coast, the study pointed out, and low-lying areas around the main cities have seen spectacular increases in population density, much of it along the shoreline. Several key industries, notably energy and chemicals, also sit low on the shore.

In his part of the study, the late brilliant geographer, Prof Bill Carter, thought Ireland would not suffer too greatly from predicted rises in sea level. But he listed some prudent controls. Among them: no buildings or caravans within 50 metres of soft shorelines; setback lines defined for all coasts; no further reclamation of estuary land; no removal of sand dunes; no removal of beach sand or gravels; all coastal buildings to be storm-proofed and insured.

In the years since that was written, how far have planning policies responded? How many developers are being told, I shouldn't build there, if I were you? Thousands of coastal bungalows have since been built without the traditional concrete barges to lock in the roof at the gables; thousands of trailer-loads of sand are still taken from the shore. And where does Carter's injunction against estuary reclamation leave the grand plans of Dublin's Port Authority?

We missed the Big Wind that wrecked France last month. But it is trends that matter, even in the new, increasingly chaotic, extremes of weather. Between the 1970s and mid-1990s there was actually a fall in the number of moderate gales across Ireland and Scotland - but the annual number of damaging storms, with a core pressure lower than 950 hPa and winds of between 60 and 80 knots, actually doubled.

The fear must now be that, as more heat moves from the Equator to the poles, hurricanes born in the Caribbean will survive to make their landfall in Europe. They will be hugely moisture-laden and release such quantities of rain upon Ireland that great areas of the Central Plain could become winter lakes.

Beyond this are the threshold triggers to catastrophe now undergoing expert review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - things like the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream, giving us the climate of Labrador.

Agreeing not to talk about all this may make us feel more comfortable, but is leading us into a dubious grasp upon the future. Not only do we plan as if global warming was a scientists' invention, but in Europe we grudge commitment to cutting back on the gases that have caused it.

Even if we all switched to bicycles tomorrow, and cut the throats of all the cattle to stop them belching methane, great and unstoppable change is already launched into our atmosphere.

How long before ravaged communities take to what is left of their streets in a vain demand for action? Is it numbness, inertia or mere complacency that keeps it off our public agenda?