Extreme weather and that sense of disorientation

PRESIDENT'S LOG:Admit the obvious: there's not a snowball's chance in hell that Ireland will ever get the hang of bad weather, writes FERDINAND VON PRONDZYNSKI

AS I WRITE this, I have just returned from a walk around the DCU campus to have a look at the effects of the recent severe weather, and thankfully we haven’t suffered much damage. Right now the main problem is all the melted snow because the big thaw has created big pools of water all over the place.

Yes, the water everywhere and the reports of floods from various parts of the country can of course only mean one thing: there is a serious national water shortage, and we are all being asked to conserve it!

A senior academic who moved to Ireland several years ago recently told me that he had come to the view that Ireland can only cope with one kind of weather: sunny spells and scattered showers, with a bit of drizzle (“nice soft rain”) thrown in – for about half the day. Anything else creates an immediate panic, as we find we have no grit, or the tar is melting on the roads, or the drains are clogged up, causing floods. We don’t like sunshine when it gets too hot, or snow when it gets too, well, snowy, or frost when it gets too cold. But we don’t mind bursts of rain, and we seem to be conditioned to expect some amount of wind.

Still, we are better than we used to be. I remember the big freeze in January 1982, when I was a lecturer in TCD. There really was quite an amount of snow, but at that time we had (as far as I can recall) no gritting lorries in the entire state, and so the effect of the snow and frost was to make the roads pretty well impassable, even in the city.

I lived in Monkstown at the time (oh yes, it’s terrible to admit once living on the southside), and there was no way I could drive my car into the centre. In fact, I couldn’t drive it out of my cul-de-sac, because some driver unable to negotiate the icy conditions had just abandoned his car in the middle of the road, making access impossible.

I recall ringing Trinity to find out whether the college was open, but couldn’t get anyone on the phone. Being a conscientious type, I decided to go in anyway, but had to make the entire journey on foot.

When I arrived, the building in which I worked was locked, and nobody was to be seen – though curiously, the main (locked) door had a notice on it saying that the building was open. So I walked back to Monkstown, and managed to get hit (but, amazingly, not hurt) by a skidding car just outside the RDS.

A few days later everything was back to normal for me, but not as it happens for the-then Tanaiste, Michael O’Leary, who never recovered politically from having been unable to handle his responsibility for clearing the snow. This time the minister responsible was John Gormley, and he has also looked distinctly uncomfortable in this role. Being the Minister for Snow is a sure kiss of death,

Anyway, this time round we had a couple of weeks of fairly testing conditions. Then on Friday, January 8th, a few critical things happened. The Met Office declared that the big freeze would last for the foreseeable future, and that the early part of the following week would be particularly horrendous.

In response, Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe announced that all schools would be closed for the first three days of that week. And then UCD announced it was also going to shut down. Indeed by Sunday, January 10th, one Sunday newspaper was reporting that the freeze might last to the end of February or beyond.

All of that could, of course, only mean one thing: that the big thaw was about to set in. And so indeed it did, and by last Monday we were all ankle deep in pools of melted snow, contemplating the new hazard of water shortages.

So, no, we don’t do weather crises very well. Extreme weather conditions create a sense of disorientation, because we are just too familiar with our accustomed scattered showers and mild temperatures.

On the other hand, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we do handle them well, because while we complain, skid on the roads, close the schools and do other such stuff, we don’t lose our sense of humour or our sense of fun. We know we are not handling this well, but we are able to laugh at it, and in the end we remain tolerant of those who over-react – or don’t know how to react at all.

And while there have been issues for both staff and students in the universities, particularly around what is exam time for some, we will get on with it and we will manage to arrange whatever is necessary to ensure that people are not unduly disadvantaged by the recent experience.

And, of course in 25 years from now we will still be telling our anecdotes from the big freeze of 2010.

Ferdinand von Prondzynski is president of Dublin City University