- “Forty years before the Deluge, Ceasair [granddaughter of Noah] came to Ireland with 50 girls and three men; Bith, Ladhra and Fintain, their names.” (Annals of the Four Masters)
- “He slew the serpent of Loch Sileann that brought a treacherous deluge on our host, and the two serpents of Loch Foyle ...” (The Book of the Lays of Fionn)
- “The Age of Christ 433 ... And the Ui Neill and the Oirghialla came to a certain water, and the river swelled against them so that they were not able to cross it in consequence of the greatness of the flood.” (Annals continued)
- “At Patrick’s Well near Limerick ... the prince of the Desi came late to the assembly for which Patrick was waiting. He excused himself on account of the rain, but the excuse did not satisfy the saint, who predicted that all his meetings for the future should be attended by showers.” (Mary Francis Cusack, The Life of St Patrick)
- “The Age of Christ 918 ... A great flood in this year, so that the water reached the Abbot’s fort of Cluain-mac-Nois.” (Annals)
- “The Age of Christ 939 ... A great flood in this year, so that the lower half of Cluain-mac-Nois was swept away by the water.” (Ibid.)
- “And after that there was the official landing of Lady Jales Casemate, in the year of the flood 1132.” (James Joyce, Finnegans Wake)
- “The land of Ireland is uneven, mountainous, soft, watery, woody ... open to winds and floods of rain, and so fenny as it hath bogs upon the very tops of mountains, not bearing man or beast but dangerous to pass.” (Fynes Moryson, A Description of Ireland)
- “Then the day broke suddenly into torrents of rain, and no man could fire a musket and the fighting closed in with blood on every knife and javelin.” (Seán O’Faoláin, The Great O’Neill)
- “A cabin with no place to sit down/But dripping soot from above and oozings from below/No end of weeds growing riotously/And the scrapings of hens across it/Its roof-tree sagging, its couples bending/And brown rain falling heavily.” (Brian Merriman, The Midnight Court)
- “It was about the middle of winter. The day was gloomy and tempestuous almost beyond any other I remember; dark clouds rolled over the hills about me, and a close, sleet-like rain fell in slanting drifts that chased each other rapidly towards the earth on the course of the blast.” (William Carleton, Wildgoose Lodge)
- “The opinion of Dr Kindley himself was that the potatoes had contracted a kind of dropsy. Through the extraordinary dampness of the weather they had become laden with water they could not absorb, and ‘wet putrefaction’ had set in.” (Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger)
- “And O, the drenching grey weather/With April half through her tether/And May on the wing.” (Katharine Tynan, Rain Raineth)
- “It was a wet autumn and he spoke that day with his head uncovered in the rain. Later he took Emily and her daughter Delia to dinner at the Royal Marine Hotel in Kingstown. He sat in his wet clothes but drank champagne and seemed in the best of spirits.” (FSL Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell)
- “It was only two weeks after this that he made his final speech in Ireland. Whether because of exposure to the rain at Cabinteely the previous Sunday, or because he was at last cracking under the accumulated strains of the past eleven months, he was quite evidently ill ...” (Ibid.)
- “That thawing cloud would gradually sweep across all the coloured plain, depositing its vapour in the already sodden fields and the browned thatch of the cabins, until after a slow journey of fifty miles its pall blackened into a downpour on the Kerry mountains.” (Seán O’Faoláin, A Nest of Simple Folk)
- “But the wind had dropped, as it so often does in Dublin when all the respectable men and women whom it delights to annoy have gone to bed, and the rain fell in a uniform untroubled manner. It fell upon the littoral, the mountains and the plains, and notably on the Central Bog it fell with a rather desolate uniformity.” (Samuel Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks)
- “The lowering skies seemed to conspire with us, coming down in a shroud of dreary mist to within a few yards of the wet road where we were waiting. Everything was very still with no sound in our ears except the dripping of the trees.” (Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman)
- “[Divney] had made off with the box of money, leaving me alone with the dead man and with a spade which was now probably tinging the watery mud around it with a weak pink stain.” (Ibid.)
- “When are you going to hang me? I asked ...‘Tomorrow morning if we have the scaffold up in time and unless it is raining. You would not believe how slippery the rain can make a new scaffold’.” (Ibid.)
- “There were nights as if I was on a fishing boat at sea; house lights dipping through the washing of rain and wind blowing salty in the throat.” (Ernie O’Malley, On Another Man’s Wound)
- “Darkness came quickly. I spread out my map on the ground while I searched for matches. Rain fell. I heard the noise of bicycle chains; men halted to talk outside the hedge. They were police. Raindrops pattered off my map; the drops sounded like revolver shots.” (Ibid)
- “Gaol was at first a half-world of bone-cold, smells, muddy light, and crushing walls … Rain would pelt off the walls and wind swirl and scream; both were cheerful sounds now.” (Ibid)
- “It seemed to us that the rainfall was becoming more offensive with each succeeding year and an occasional pauper was drowned on the very mainland from the volume of water and celestial emesis which poured down upon us; a non-swimmer was none too secure in bed in these times.” (Myles na gCopaleen, The Poor Mouth.”)
- “Great rivers flowed by the doorway and, if it be true that the potatoes were all swept from our fields, it is also a fact that fish were often available by the wayside as a nocturnal exchange. Those who reached their beds safely on dry land, by the morning found themselves submerged. At night people often perceived canoes from the Blaskets going by and the boatmen considered it a poor night’s fishing which did not yield them a pig or a piglet from Corkadoragha in their nets. (Ibid)
- “One day, I put the matter to the Old-Fellow … Do you think, oh gentle person, said I, that we’ll ever again be dry? I really don’t know, oh mild one, said he, but if this rain goes on …’tis my idea that the fingers and toes of the Gaelic paupers will be closed and have webs on them like the ducks from now on …” (Ibid)
- “The black herds of the rain were grazing/In the gap of the pure cold wind.” (Austin Clarke)
- “My hills hoard the bright shillings of March/While the sun searches in every pocket.” (Patrick Kavanagh)
- “A number of botanists had foregathered at Roundstone, and the particular occasion was a kind of symposium on bogs, held in the middle of one of the wettest of them … We stood in a ring in the shelterless expanse while discussion raged on the application of the terms soligenous, topogenous, and ombrogenous; the rain and wind, like our discussion, waxed in intensity, and under the unusual super-incumbent weight, whether of mere flesh and bone or of intellect, the floating surface of the bog slowly sank till we were all half-way up to our knees in brown water.” (Robert Lloyd Praegar, The Way That I Went)
- “The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. (Heinrich Boll, Irish Journal)
- “Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick.” (Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes)
- “The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year’s Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges. It provoked cures galore … From October to April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried; tweed and woollen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations.” (Ibid)
- “The rain drove us into the church – our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest drone, while steam rose again from our clothes to mingle with the sweetness of incense, flowers and candles … Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.” (Ibid)
- “Oh, the water/Oh-oh, the water/Oh, the water/Hope it don’t rain all day.” (Van Morrison, And It Stoned Me)
- “And you know you gotta go/Catch that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row/Throwing pennies at the bridges down below/In the rain, hail, sleet, and snow.” (Van again, Madame George)
- “My mental pictures of wild Connacht weather would furnish a municipal gallery, each of them framed in gilt and called something like ‘Tempest in Mayo’. The storm the other night would have suited Turner to a ‘T’: in the fierce headlights of a friend’s minibus, it swarmed about us in flourishes of silver, in washes of ochre and umber … The road seethed with water. It poured from every gap in the ditch, spilled from every hill stream, hummocked out of boreens.” (Michael Viney, A Year’s Turning)
- “I took shelter from a shower/And I slipped into your arms/On a rainy night in Soho/The wind was whispering all its charms.” (The Pogues)
- “Dublin in the rain is mine/A pregnant city with a Catholic mind.” (Fontaines DC)
- “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day/Rain, rain, go to Spain, never show your face again.” (Anonymous)
- “Avoid unnecessary journeys” (Teresa Mannion, RTÉ News)
‘O, the drenching grey weather’: Irish rain in 40 wonderful phrases
It has rained in Ireland every day of 2026 so far. From Samuel Beckett to Flann O’Brien, the country’s literary heritage is awash with the stuff
