Forecasters say summer is set to arrive at last

The children are going back to school next week and the days are getting noticeably shorter, but summer may be here at last.

It is nearly three months late, but Met Éireann is forecasting the first settled period of fine weather which should last for the next week at least.

The good weather is a result of the high pressure area over the Azores which hitherto has stubbornly refused to move north all summer, leaving northern Europe at the mercy of depressions which have brought with them one of the wettest summers on record.

That high pressure has belatedly decided to appear and is likely to be sitting right over the country by Friday bringing fine dry weather.

"We're getting a decent spell of good weather which looks like it will last into the early days of next week," said Met Éireann spokesman Aidan Nulty.

"All areas will get good spells of sunshine. We can forecast with a reasonable degree of certainty that the fine weather will stay around. The weather tends to settle better when we have high pressure."

There will be no heat wave but weekend temperatures are likely to reach highs of about 25 degrees, as warm as it has been throughout this soggy summer.

The good weather will be welcomed by music fans who have spent the summer plodding through oceans of mud in steady drizzles.

Tonight The Killers headline the North's biggest music festival to date, Tennent's ViTal at Ormeau Park. Drummer Ronnie Vannucci jnr has confessed that the whole band felt sorry for fans who had seen them when they headlined the Oxegen music festival in July after a weekend of atrocious weather.

The BudRising series of festivals at Marlay Park in Dublin starts tonight with The Foo Fighters followed on Saturday by Damien Rice and Sunday by The Kaiser Chiefs with support.

While the bad weather has been a nuisance to most of us, it has been a serious threat to the livelihood of farmers who will now be frantically trying to salvage what they can from a nightmare summer.

To date 80 per cent of wheat and spring barley has yet to be harvested. This time last year, 70 per cent of it was saved.

"It's a wonderful relief," said Colm McDonnell, the Irish Farmers' Association National Grain Committee chairman.

"If this week had not come, it would have been a complete disaster. The good weather has come just in time. The crops were overripe and getting into trouble," he said.