Winter is coming. Who’s to blame?

OF course our capacity for delusion has always been very necessary to our survival. If the Irish had, at various stages in our history, not been able to avoid the uncomfortable facts and decide that, ‘Shure, it’ll be grand’, the appalling vista of reality might have broken us.

The downside of this great capacity for denial is that, now and again, we get a hard, wet slap in the face from reality. Two of the big lies we told ourselves this year were that ‘Brexit will never happen anyway, Shure it won’t Ted?’ and ‘the weather has changed forever. We are pretty much a Mediterranean country now, like we were in the 1970s’.

And then last week we get a double whammy — wham, pow! An uppercut in the shape of Storm Ali and a sudden realisation that Brexit might actually happen, and it might not be good. Last week could have broken lesser people and sent them into despair. But not us. We treated these twin catastrophes with equanimity.

Storm Ali was no joke. It reminded us that much as Mother Nature can shine a kind light and give you the most memorable summer ever, she can also be brutal. We did, however, manage to salvage something out it. If there’s one thing we like more than talking about the weather, it’s figuring out whose fault everything is.

We have brought the apportioning of blame to a fine art in Ireland. There are currently about 800 various tribunals of inquiry trundling on in Ireland trying to find out who is to blame for various long-forgotten outrages. After the storm hit, we got straight down to it. Whose fault was it that we were caught unawares?

Met Eireann got out the wind speeds to explain how it wasn’t its fault. Though you could argue that when you are having to use the Beaufort wind scale and the technicalities of what constitutes a red over an orange warning to defend yourself, you’re probably losing. Simon Coveney even got in on the blame game, deciding to blame all of us for getting blase, a clear sign he thinks we won’t be having an election any time soon. The rest of us, who are usually harping on about the nanny state over-reacting to weather, blamed the nanny state for not nannying us. The argument is roughly that if you are going to nanny people, then you need to be consistent. We’ve got used to being told what to think and do, so don’t turn around now and expect us to take responsibility for ourselves.

It took us a while to realise the Brexit thing was being elevated to a red level on the omnishambles scale. Initially we thought Salzburg was just another ritual humiliation of Theresa May. As far as we can see, Theresa May gets ritually humiliated about three times a week and she just gets back up, puts some oil in her cogs, puts in a new battery pack, and marches on.

But we have an uneasy feeling that this is all getting too close for comfort, that such is the incompetence now that Brexit could happen by accident, even if no one intends it.

Winter, as they say, is coming. But shure, it’ll be grand.