IF WE had the summers they have elsewhere, the consistent, reliable sun and heat, what would our coastline look like?
Would the countless golden beaches of Donegal be a parade of high-rise hotels?
Would the broad strands of Cork and Kerry be offering an all-day English breakfast? Did our broken weather save us?
The summers of childhood are sun dappled and unending but even a distorted recalling of those childhood Augusts in Ireland fails to recreate an endless sun.
It was more that we were children and we were in Ireland and the rain didn’t bother us.
It is something to consider though that there are thousands of people in the UK who have distinctive and definitive memories of a childhood Irish summer.
Not one summer. Every summer. Summer after summer. Coming over from the big cities of England with their English accents and their Irish faces and their Irish names.
If modern Europe is now, in many ways, a place with many of the same characteristics, the same fast food outlets, the same international shops, the same cars, the same money, that childhood Ireland was most distinctively different.
Leaving the streets of Birmingham or London or Manchester and coming to Cork or Mayo or Donegal meant coming to a truly different place. A place where most of your family were, true, but a truly different place all the same.
What we still say here is that one sunny day and we forgive the place everything.
This is an island out in the Atlantic and on the edge of Europe.
The weather comes to us directly from the ocean and some days it feels like the weather is the ocean.
There are days when you dream of the sun and the warmth and the brightness.
Then a day clears and the land opens up and we sit and look and think we were in paradise all along.
Give us a stretch of warm days like we are currently having and no one thinks of anywhere else or getting away or being somewhere elsewhere.
They say that, weather wise, one in ten of our summers are good ones.
The others are broken or even downright bad, summers that never become summer. But that’s only statistics. What does that matter when the sun is shining?
Imagine all those memories of Ireland that are over there in the UK.
A treasure trove of Irish life. Memories of an Ireland that was.
Really profound memories because they have been with people for decade after decade and are peopled with loved ones no longer with us.
Going on holiday is one thing but being told every year, year after year, on the day that school finishes, that you are going ‘home’ for the summer is something much more.
That is far more profound. Going on holiday. Going home. There isn’t really any comparison.
I’m not seduced by the past. I’m not one of these everything was better in the past people.
Doesn’t that just lead to those we-want-our-country-back yahoos who pretend everything is spoiled now and the usual culprits are to blame, the young and the poor and the immigrant?
Doesn’t that just lead to thinking the country was only the country at a certain time in the past? The kind of ridiculous thinking that suggests Ireland was truly Ireland once upon a time but isn’t now.
Nonsense, as Roy Keane might say. Ireland is Ireland.
What changes is time and that’s just life. That’s just existence. Ireland today isn’t the Ireland I remember because nothing is. I’m not and you’re not.
Childhood summers weren’t sunnier or shinier they were just childhood.
This summer there will be children born on this island or there will be children born of Irish parents in some other country who will all have their own relationship with this country. By remembering ours we are not denigrating theirs.
When the sun shines, though, it does bring childhood back.
Time passes differently in the long days and we’re sitting out when on winter’s days we’d be in bed.
We’re looking up at the sky and we’re having a drink and like childhood even a few days of summer fool us in to thinking this might never end.
Of course it will but we don’t have to think about that do we? Or believe it.
On these days, see, we’re in Spain and Tenerife just without the high-rise hotels and the all-day breakfasts and our own front door is just there.
