If they got the weather right, what would we all moan about?

IDON’T think anyone could argue with the suggestion that we’ve had a lot of weather lately. In fact, just last Sunday, driving back to Dublin from Wexford – via a match in Portlaoise – we appeared to drive through six counties and seven seasons.

We had torrential rain and lights on in Kilkenny, and beating sunshine in Kildare – and in between, we encountered skies of every conceivable shade. Even by Irish standards, it was a great deal of weather – and a talking point long after the discussions of the day’s GAA fixtures had faded out.

Because, boy, we love talking about the weather. We went to a football match and all anyone wanted to talk about was the weather. And it wasn’t just because there was so much of it about – tune into the radio on any given Sunday in Ireland and you won’t hear a match report that doesn’t include a summary of the weather. Who won? The sun. Though the rain put up a spirited defence.

So we shouldn’t be too surprised about the deluge of complaints that Met Éireann has received in the past year, published yesterday in this paper. But what makes these wonderful missives worth reading is not that they focus on the female meteorologists’ appearance – after all, only one complaint urged Siobhán Ryan to remove her false eyelashes and clip back her fringe, and even that complainant gallantly added, ‘Sorry for the personal comment’ – but that so many people clearly blame the long-suffering Met Éireann personnel for the weather.

One unfortunate presenter ‘used the word miserable’, ran one complaint. ‘The weather can’t ever be miserable, you’re the one who is miserable.’ That was sent in February last year when, I’d wager, the weather was quite miserable and, by coincidence, the complainant along with it.

Then there were the people unhappy at the scale of this spring’s Beast From The East, particularly, it seems, when the storm didn’t quite turn out to be as dramatic as promised. Although in Cavan, according to one complainant, it was ‘very windy with blizzard showers all afternoon’ – which, the correspondent pointed out, Gerard Murphy should have reported because ‘he only lives a bit away’. And the less said about the complaint that France was given preferential treatment over Spain in the European weather forecast the better. Surely everyone knows that France gets way more weather than Spain?

All things considered, it’s probably just as well that it’s not possible to correspond with an app. Because I know I’m not the only person who now pretty much plans their whole life around the hourly updates on the weather app on my phone.

Walk the dog? Not till after 4pm, when there’s a full sun symbol instead of a cloud. Put out the washing? Look at that wind tomorrow at dawn! That’s the window right there.

I have had experiences lately of walking in the park – in the actual weather – with friends who are describing what the weather is supposed to be while consulting their phones. We also now have a tendency to look at how it’s going in other places – how sunny is it in Gorey or Dingle, where we are not, for example? – just as how, when we were in Malaga for a long weekend a few weeks ago, we kept a beady eye on the weather app for Dublin, just in case.

SOMETIMES, if I’m particularly worried, I’ll compare the weather in Dublin on the app with the weather in Templeogue, where I’m sitting. I could just look out the window, but where’s the sport in that?

I presume that it goes without saying that we are livid on those occasions when the app is saying something that the sky is not. Those are the times when we take a screen-shot of the offending forecast and post it to social media in a wave of outrage. I don’t know if other nationalities have a groove worn into their phone screens over that little picture of the sun peeping hopefully from behind a cloud, but I suspect it’s just us.

I don’t think anyone else is quite as consumed, as engaged and – as the litany of complaints to the national forecaster testifies – enraged by the weather as we are. But then, we do get an awful lot of it. And as it happens, a lot of what we’ve got lately has been very good indeed. Sunny and 19C in Templeogue as I write this.

Now, if it’s no longer sunny by the time you read it, then please address your complaints to Met Éireann, and not to me.