Grumblings about our weather were somewhat muted after a phone call from our Geneva correspondent who mentioned, in reply to our own complaints, that in Geneva, in two months, there had been just five hours of sunshine. Geneva, that lovely city by the lake which so many travellers hold in mind affectionately, with its open lakeside restaurants, its vistas of mountain peaks and its miles of public parks along the shod. Geneva: five hours sunshine in two months.
And a traveller recently returned from a ski holiday confirmed that, from above, a thick pall of what he called pollution could be seen lying over city and lake. Geneva in the Thirties was especially a lively city, the diplomatic centre of the world you could say, as representatives of some 60 nations gathered for conference after conference and the sons and daughters of the League of Nations Secretariat thronged the International School. Philip Noel Baker, British junior Minister described the exhilaration of Geneva in those days.
But it takes a lot to impress a Belfastman. Joe Connolly, a Minister in de Valera's Government accompanied the Chief on his famous first visit after the 1932 election, when Dev gave the League a lecture, well merited. Connolly, in his memoirs, edited by J. Anthony Gaughen put Geneva in its place.
"I was much impressed by my first view of Geneva and particularly by its orderliness and spotless clean line but it had, despite these attractive qualities, somewhat the same atmospheric impact on me as I experience when I revisit Bangor, County Down. Bangor, like Geneva, is beautifully laid out and almost spotlessly clean, but it, too, has the cold, slightly inhuman, Calvinistic current of air permeating everywhere. It is probably due to my early associations with Bangor, but I never walk along its well kept streets without expecting to run into an evangelist who will threaten me with damnation or demand to know where I expect to spend eternity. I had the same sense of expectancy in Geneva." Memoirs of Senator Joseph Connolly, published by Irish Academic Press £24.95. A fantastic read.