Columnist with the Irish Examiner

Two heatwaves in one summer? I just don’t know, there’s "good weather" and there’s "a lot of weather." I know you remember the summer of 1976 and we all got a clatter, and shur it didn’t do us a bit of harm. I only remember back to 1982. But still, forty years is enough data to be going on with and this heat is as heaty as I’ve seen.

I can’t remember a harvest like this. The Combine Man must just have had a list of fields, a list of days, and then divided one by the other. No threat of Atlantic depression, unsettled conditions, scattered showers, or the "tail end of a Caribbean storm" or "will we even be able to get the machines into the field with the mud?" And hay? HAY? With the All Ireland finishing early this year, it’s “the hay saved and everyone bet.”

How will we change if this becomes something regular? Climate change might just bring more rain and storm but let’s say every summer it brought a couple of heatwaves. You could argue “what harm and don’t we deserve it?” But we will be in a different country.

Will we turn into a country of net exporters of heat instead of consumers? Icelandics and Greenlanders coming south to the beaches of Donegal while we head north for a bit of a breeze.

Will we even book a sun holiday? We go to all sorts of shite-holes just for the bit of sun. But what if we knew there would be at least one heatwave every summer? And also that the places we go to are probably battling burning forests. It seems a long way to travel for a cheap San Miguel.

Will people travel to Galway from the east of the country, explicitly for a rain holiday. (I’ve checked all the climate models and they all say it will still be pissing rain in Galway most of the time) “You were unlucky with the weather,” says the barman on Shop Street to the Dub as they both stare out at the downpour. “ I don’t care, bud. I love it.”

Our definition of a good summer and a bad summer will change. A bad summer used to look like a sparsely attended rural festival where set dancers are performing to thirteen people in a storm when everyone else has gone to the pub, or to book a holiday. A good summer will be enough rain and not too much wildfire.

I wonder, would our houses have to change? All over the country, people who had architect-built "reimaginings" of glass and steel and atriums to let the light in will be "un-converting" them into the old design classic: The narrow-windowed thick-walled farmhouse. The damp in the flat roof extension would be repackaged as a water wall. A climate-change mitigation "feature."

Room to Improve would have Dermot Bannon obsessing over keeping the light out. “Now guys, I know you’re not happy with the old open plan and I agree with you. See here, with the sunlight coming from all angles? That’s a 'no-no'. Put in some corridors that go nowhere so you’ll have a bit of shade. Natural light is your enemy.”

Will it affect our national character? The dashed expectations of summer are in-built into our small talk conversation, our attitude, and our literature.

Dark Irish novels about family secrets, parish strife, the Catholic Church, and repression may no longer be sound-tracked by endless precipitation and soft ground. The Irish novel will instead be noted for metaphors about heat shimmering, the glare of the sunshine, a ceiling fan. Everyone drawling and sipping iced tea.

And the less money you have, the less choice and shade you’ll have, and the more you’ll suffer. So some things never change.

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