Sir, – Frank McNally’s delightful tour of Irish rain through 40 wonderful phrases reminded us that rain isn’t just a national condition, but a literary inheritance – one we share with the wider world (“’O, the drenching grey weather’: Irish rain in 40 wonderful phrases,“ An Irish Diary, February 22nd). If, as McNally notes, Ireland’s writers from Beckett to Flann O’Brien have been “awash with the stuff”, then so too have their literary cousins across the sea.
The drenching grey weather of Dickens’s London of 1861 feels instantly familiar. In Great Expectations, a novel many of us in Ireland have encountered, willingly or otherwise during our school days, Dickens captured the universal dreariness of perpetual rain: “It was wretched weather, stormy, and wet; stormy and wet; and mud, mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind.”
In Ireland, as 2026 continues to deliver a daily drenching, we find ourselves living out Dickens’s lament, in what seems like the same eternal mud. But as your article so beautifully shows, we also have a near-inexhaustible vocabulary to describe and perhaps even celebrate this sodden state.
Thank you for reminding us that, in language at least, we are never really under the weather, – Yours, etc,
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BARBARA CLANCY,
Stillorgan,
Co Dublin.
Sir, – The 1972 Nobel laureate Heinrich Boll definitely needs to be included in the list of writers who have admired or been driven to despair by the incessant Irish rain.
Boll immortalised “the Irish rain” in his 1957 book Irish Journal having experienced a storm while staying on Achill Island in the early 1950s. So impressed was he by the rain that he devoted a whole chapter to it. The following is his memorable opening sentence: “The rain here is absolute, magnificent and frightening.”
By the time the storm abated, Boll appeared to have made friends with it, suggesting that to call “this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as it is inappropriate to call blazing sunshine good weather”. He at least came to an understanding of why we get so much rain when writing: “. . . and how much water collects over four thousand kilometres of ocean, water that is happy to have finally reached people, solid ground after having fallen for so long only into water, only into itself. After all, can it be fun for the rain to always fall into water?” – Yours, etc,
SÉAMUS McCLELLAND,
Konstanz,
Germany.
Sir, – “Oh god, will it ever stop raining?” (The Saw Doctors, 1998). – Yours, etc.
CONNELL VAUGHAN
Cabra,
Dublin 7.
