We've had our bellies full of this Irish Tundra

THIS has gone beyond a joke. Not sure about where you are right now, but it is pretty cold in this neck of the woods. Outside, in the back garden, the birds are acting strangely. They have long emptied the gizmo that contains the food. In fact, they have broken the gizmo up and are burning it in their water barrel right now and have gathered around the flames, warming their frozen wings and singing gospel.

They would fly south to balmier lands and join the Minister for Transport in sipping pina coladas if they could. But it is too cold to fly, too cold to walk and way, way too cold to play any sort of outdoor sport. Things are reaching critical mass. They say that soon the shortage of salt will become so severe that cafes will start charging per shake of the cellar. They say that secondary roads could stay frozen for months. They say that the O’Byrne Cup might never be played.

These past few weeks of life in the Irish Tundra have surely given cause to major introspection. How are you meant to live in a country that has become nothing more than an uncultivated ice-rink? For the first week or so it was a novelty: the whiteness made everywhere, even the half-finished housing estates and edge-of-town warehouses, look heartbreakingly beautiful, and the air was fresh and kids were firing snowballs and elders reminisced about the great freezes of ’63 and ’47.

But that was then. A few weeks in and you don’t have to look too closely at people to notice that odd, gleam of impending madness in their eyes: it is as if everyone is now a guest at the Overlook Hotel. I met a Gael of national renown on the street the other day. He was recognisable only by his voice because he was wrapped in a heavy coat – mid-90’s All-Star vintage – a long scarf celebrating either Carlow or Jamaica and a stunningly luxuriant fur hat that brought to mind the heyday of Leonid Brezhnev.

Hidden in these thick layers as he was, I had never seen the man looking so vulnerable as he moved gingerly across the wasteland of the car park, a shadow of the colossus who had strode so purposefully along the sidelines of the most famous GAA grounds in the country in those years when the countryside was green and the temperatures roared into the low teens. This hat he wore was disturbing.

“Thought you’d rather go naked than wear fur,” I blurted out, just to break the ice.

“Every man has his limit,” he shrugged, casting a fateful look at the sky, which was dazzlingly white, snow-packed and low. His eyelashes were coated in frost. He checked the stopwatch that he carries as a force of habit and spoke about his fears for the weeks ahead. As far as he could tell, no team was doing any sort of training. Except for the Dubs. Reports that the Dubs were out before dawn and after dusk each evening had crossed the land like wildfire.

The rumours were that hundreds if not thousands of young Dubs were being auditioned for a place in an new elite squad and that they would be whittled down by running suicides and kicking points in sub-zero conditions. We agreed that this was a brave but savage practice. By rights, it should have been stopped; someone should have put a call into the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Dubs, if such a body exists – and if it doesn’t, it ought to.

The theory was fine. There is no doubt that the Dubs need to erase the mental anguish that they have accumulated from successive All-Ireland seasons in recent years. Still, this Full Metal Jacketstuff in the worst winter in almost half a century seemed unnecessarily excessive.

But the Gael was worried about bigger implications. What if Dublin’s cold-weather programme reaps rewards, he wondered. It would lead to an abrupt and sudden end to the fashion for warm-weather training that all GAA teams have adapted.

“If Dublin wins the All-Ireland this year,” he predicted, “every effin’ team in the land will be lookin’ to go training in Helsinki. County boards will go bankrupt.” Then he moved away and disappeared into the whiteness. I had a feeling I would never see him again.

The weather has been playing tricks on everyone. Páidí Ó Sé, the wiliest of all wily old foxes, found himself in a bit of trouble for breezily opining that he could manage Mayo to an All-Ireland title in no time at all. Páidí meant no harm: he just woke up one day to find that the snows of Kilimanjaro had supplanted themselves upon his beloved Ventry and it was all a bit unsettling and his mind ran into different pastures.

On the radio the other evening, Páidí declared that no offence was meant and, if not Kerry, then Mayo stands as the county he would love to see winning an All-Ireland. “Apart from other counties that I like,” he added with a wonderfully democratic flourish. And county men everywhere, listening in their icy cars wondered: does he mean us?

John Maughan, the man who nearly won an All-Ireland for Mayo, came on the wireless to say no offence was taken. And John O’Mahony, the man who may just win an All-Ireland for Mayo, was on the radio to assure the public that Mayo would be training that very evening, to hell with the ice-bound motorways, with frozen lakes and fog and the rest of it. He said that he was on the way to meet the players in Castlebar as he spoke.

But he sounded awfully far away, as if he were phoning through a blizzard from the base camp of Mount Everest.

In truth, the three Gaels were just happy to be chatting to another, to reassure one another that this was still Ireland, that they were still out there. They all seemed a bit unnerved by the Big Freeze. Give a Gael howling winds and rain and he will just get on with it, but ice underfoot unnerves him. Always has, always will.

Elsewhere, people are doing all kinds of strange stuff. People have taken to walking across the ice-covered lakes, as if they live on the edge of Erie or Michigan. Perhaps they know what they are at, but to me this seems an insane practice. It has made for photographs worthy of an Ansel Adams collection and may well be great fun. Still, Irish ice is not to be trusted. It does not know itself.

Watching those intrepid lake walkers made you want to freak out like Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone: “The Ice is Gonna Break!” And this newspaper carried a photograph of a man cross country skiing his way through to suburban Dublin. The gent’s name was Kevin Cavey (left) and as far as one could ascertain from the image, he is the same Kevin Cavey who was one of the first, if not the very first, person to surf in Irish waters back in the 1960s. The Neil Armstrong of Irish surfing, if you like. This is a man who can predict a trend.

So this is the way the Irish winter may be destined. Future Januarys may be filled with ski-walkers. Too late for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver next month, but snow sports may be the way ahead. For now, though, the green fields are frozen and abandoned and everyone is feeling the chill. Everyone wants to get outside again.