For more than ten years, Wexford Science Café has been running on the 3rd Tuesday of the Month; except when it's not. Third Tuesday is Patrick's Day this March, so the date was shifted forw a week . . . and the guest speakers were announced as MetÉireann veterans Evelyn Cusack and Séamus Walsh. They wrote They Say It Might Rain TSIMR published by Gill last year which is a breezy, profusely illustrated, book about the history of Irish Weather and its prediction. I snagged a copy off the shelf in Tramore library and hoovered through it in prep for their WxScCaff perf. I particularly like including a number of weather related An Post stamp pictures.
I am a MetÉireann fan, I chekkitout their rainfall every day, sometimes several times a day and I follow incommming storms [so many storms Babet Chandra Darwinday Éowyn Frank] as I touch up my chain-saw to process the damage. This book is defo my jam, and a good bit was new to me. The loss of the Henri IV in the Crimean Storm of 1854. The Royal Charter Storm of 1859. That Éowyn (2025) is running Oíche na Gaoithe Móire (1839) close for being the biggest storm since records began.The [massive, shared] MetÉireann weather computer is located in . . . Iceland. I hope because they have supercheap hydro-power there. I have touched the Finnish equivalent in Espoo; and it is also massive.
The book is grand, and probably fit for parochial purpose: serving the domestic market. Hopefully inspiring some [Irish] youngsters to embrace meteorology. But I have gripes. In 2017, Gill also published Luke O'Neill's popular science book Humanology; A Scientist's Guide to Our Amazing Existence (2018) which I took apart in 2019.
Like too many Irish books TSIMR runs to chauvinism (unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people). Puffing up any player in the tale who happens to be Irish as if their contributions to science reflect well on the current inhabitants of the island. Cusack, Walsh and Gill claim George "Navier-Stokes Eqn" Stokes (1819-1902) because he was born in Sligo; and "our own" Robert "Boyle's Law" Boyle (1627-1691) because he was born in Waterford. But these prophets were without honour in their own country at the time and upstakes to seek a fortune where their talents were recognised and valued. And "Of course, the weather is all about temperatures and pressure, so Boyle is the dude" is a particularly charmless way of referring to The Great Man and his work. Maybe it is an attempt, using the supposed argot of youth, to make the book, or Boyle, more accessible to teens. The with-no-shame answer for the woeful lack of support for Irish science through the whole of the 19thC & 20thC until Science Foundation Ireland in ~2000AD is to play the MOPE card and blame the Brits.
In 2022, my pal Denis alerted me to a recent pre-print which cast side-eye at the hottest ever in Ireland record temperature 33.3°C observed at Kilkenny Castle on Sun 26 June 1887. That paper. " Given that Ireland is now the only country in Europe to have a national heat record that was set in the 19th century, a reassessment of the verity of this record is both timely and valuable" ie. that 1887 measurement is so extra-ordinary as to require extra-ordinary standards of evidence [Bloboprev Arsenic] but [autoquote] pretty much everyone, including Met Éireann, trots it out with neither sanity-check nor health-warning. Add TSIMR to the list of those whose QC goes squidgy when anything Irish is exceptional. Working hypothesis, one of the KK Castle gardeners popped the thermometer in his tea just before measurement time - for a jape, like.
If I read The Blob, rather than just writing it, I'm sure I'd be annoyed by the tendency to drop clever-clogs I-know-this-thing anecdotes, asides and additions. A good copy editor would ruthlessly hack this crud from the final draft because it impedes the flow and adds nothing but distraction for the reader. My current hypothesis is that Gill copy editors add oxygen-sucking asides to the (?slightly boring, pedantic, but correct?) mss submitted by scientists . . . to make it more accessible. I'll just give one example. p.120 "Similarly the southern lights are aurora australis, from the Graeco-Roman south wind god, Auster. (Terra Australis was the name given in 1570 to the proposed 'southern land' now known as Australia)" It might be more respectful to give some credit/space to the 13 y.o. reader to have their own aha! moment about the etymology.
And sometimes these didactic asides are just . plain . wrong. p.135 "Iceberg means 'ice mountain' in Danish Dutch Swedish and German". In none of those languages is the statement true: Eisberg DE; isbjerg DK; ijsberg NL; isberg SE; . . . also for completeness ísjaki IS; isfjell NO nynorsk; isberg NO bokmål. Weirdly iceberg means iceberg in FR ES PT IT. Also jäävuori FI cnoc oighir IE. harrumph!
And the WexSciCaf gig? They announced that the perf would run for 45 mins, leaving 15 minutes for questions. It ran over this wishful thunk by 20 minutes. That stuff really cranks my gears. When they were working to the second presenting the weather for RTE it never happened. Broadcasting abhors a silence, and they were able then, at zero notice, to e x t e n d their slot if the news presenter's toupé fell off OR get what needed saying in less time because The Pope had talked too much immediately prior. Some [far too much] of that time over-run was taken up making a laughing stock of the Infant of Prague. Back in the day, statues of the IoP would be left out in the garden to stay the rain on a wedding day. There were plenty of people in the room whose parents (or who themselves) had been party to this widespread Irish practice. Gratuitously slagging them off is unnecessary and exclusionary. Running over time is also disrespectful. But at least in this case it spared everyone from listening to me get fighty.
Bonus. Because we're all Olds, before kick-off I got chatting to the couple next to me. They turned out to be Frank & Síofra Gallagher, long time stalwarts of Tinahely Courthouse Arts Centre. Which was nice because I got to thank them for the many shows, films and events we attended with or without The Daus back in the day. I mind the night in March 2013 when we drove through fallen branches and floods to see Jiro Dreams of Sushi at Tinahely.
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