It might surprise most metropolitan sophisticates that my youngest daughter, a millennial, has included a request to please “put out the Child of Prague the night before” her wedding in the invitations to her upcoming nuptials.
Those of us born during those sepia-tinged years when superstition and religion dominated our culture can confirm that this little statue of the infant Jesus regularly kept the rain away for wedding days when placed in the garden of the bride’s home. Indeed, if his head happened to be decapitated during the night by a gust of wind, or a severe frost, the sun would shine even higher on the wedding day.
Now, as the mother of the bride, I assumed Saoirse would be relying on one of the many weather apps on her phone.
She lives in Kinsale these days but regularly returns to her childhood home on a Co Mayo island. Unsurprisingly, then, checking the predictions on Met Éireann and Windy, YR and Carrot, Surfline and Accu Weather are integral to her travel plans.
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After all, in one scroll she can confirm the cloud patterns, rainfall rates, wind strength and temperatures for the coming days and even get a more general inkling of the long-range forecast, courtesy of all sorts of satellites and scientific computations.
With the advantage of being a geography graduate, she might as well be a meteorologist in Glasnevin or at the Bishop Rock Station in the Himalayas.
Unlike her islander father and grandfather, she will not be found at the gable of the house reading the sky, or standing on top of Coinne Rón checking the wave patterns on Mweelan or the behaviour of gannets and guillemots along the cliff face under the lighthouse.
Oh, my lord, it seems like another world since that winter’s day when I was returning to the island with a ballast of shopping after a visit home to the big shmoke. Unsurprisingly, the dial-up phone service was on the blink and I couldn’t get through to the post office to check which port the boat was planning to sail to. There had been a high Atlantic swell for the previous week and thus no landings at the little mainland pier of Roonagh, beyond Louisburgh.
So, the alternative was a chance run to the non-tidal pier at Clochmór on Achill Island and the other end of Clew Bay. These were the days long before scheduled ferry services and the relatively small craft were often tied up in chains and ropes for weeks on end during the winter months.
In the end, with the help of a hot whiskey or two, I somehow divined that one of the island’s fishing boats was making a run to Roonagh, so I hightailed it in a taxi from the Three Arches pub and B&B out the west road from Westport.
It was a fine February day as we hauled my shopping down the salt-soaked steps in Roonagh. As we bounced out of the harbour myself and the skipper chatted about Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and whether there was a real chance that the Berlin Wall would fall.
We must have been halfway into our 6.5km voyage when all hell broke loose and the sky suddenly had the appearance of blue murder. A battalion of black clouds gathered out west on the horizon followed quickly by a shower of hailstones that would cut the nose clean off you.
The doughty skipper, a good talker in all weather conditions, kept our conversation flowing as he was thrown to the deck while still holding on to the wheel. To this day, I feel pride in the fact that I remained remarkably calm: not a characteristic I have displayed too often on my numerous journeys to and from “the rock”, as we call Clare Island.
Meanwhile, out on the island the old men of the sea – the masters of meteorology – had expressed concern about how the pressure had suddenly dropped in “the glass”, also known as a barometer. Basically, a rapid drop in atmospheric pressure means a low-pressure system is imminent.
Well, our low-pressure system had landed with a vengeance, causing such concern on the island that while some of the women dropped to their knees with their rosaries, a handful of the men gathered on the clifftop over the Quay to monitor the progress of the boat.
Of course, these days the island ferries and boats are equipped with a global positioning system and all sorts of navigational equipment. The islanders can watch their boats trip across the waves on their various devices while eating their porridge.
However, it doesn’t stop the ancient weather gods, Dagda and the Cailleach, landing the occasional surprise, putting the heart-crossways in us all, even our millennials and Gen Zs.
