Met Éireann is giving the weather for the day to honour St. Patrick himself to be pretty much what we might have all expected – sunny intervals with showers forecasted for Sunday, March 17.
If pushed, I probably could have come up with that option myself; it is the safest of all weather-related predictions to come up with in this country at any time of the year.
However, the really significant news coming out of Met Éireann, is the fact that Sunday’s temperatures could hit a balmy 12°C.
Let’s be honest, it hasn’t stopped raining since last September. Irish farmers are a pretty resilient bunch.
St. Patrick
It is said that St. Patrick will ‘always turn the stone’. I assume this means that the weather will start to improve, once we have duly celebrated the country’s patron saint.
To be honest, it’s a metaphor that doesn’t do a lot for me at a personal level. The very mention of the word ‘stone’ sets me to thinking of days gone by when some person a lot older than me would have ploughed a field.
Immediately, thereafter, I would have been dispatched to get on with the job of stone-picking.
I never had the ‘opportunity’ of breaking rocks with a sledge hammer in Van Diemen’s Land back in the day, or in some other ‘far off distant land’.
However, I sense that the parallels are quite stark, summed up in the following term – ‘back breaking.’
Meanwhile, I am declaring that the word ‘drought’ must not enter the vocabulary of anyone associated with Irish agriculture throughout 2024.
I don’t care if rain ceases to materialise, in any sense, for the rest of the year. Given the madness of 2023, a few dry months would do me well, thank you very much.
Surely, there must be enough water now stored in our soils, wells, streams, rivers and lakes to do us all for a decade.
Climate change is an associated term that we need to hear very little of in 2024.
Farmers have been brow beaten enough with the mind-numbing detail associated with the ‘never ending’ statements from our politicians and environmental groups on this subject.
Unfortunately, a lot of this verbiage hints strongly at farmers being part of the problem. It’s time these people had a reality check.
Farmers are at the heart of the solution to the climate change challenge. In my opinion, society as a whole needs to recognise this fundamental reality in a very meaningful way.