Irish people are fiercely loyal to their county. We can spend hours telling you everything that is wrong with the place, but if you agree with us, there could be trouble.
This is especially true in the west of Ireland, where loyalty extends to the weather.
We know it rains.
We are not stupid.
We can see it.
But we refuse to accept that this is necessarily a bad thing.
My uncle was Donegal through and through, despite having been forced by employment to live in Dublin. Every summer he would pack the family into the car and bring them back to Donegal for a week or two.
When they returned to Dublin, a neighbour would ask him how the holiday went.
“Grand,” he would say. “Lovely weather.”
Later, the same neighbour would meet my aunt.
“It never stopped raining.”
This went on for years.
My uncle wasn’t actually lying. He simply had a different understanding of weather.
If there was one dry afternoon during a fortnight, Donegal had enjoyed “a great spell”.
If the sun came out while everyone was having lunch, it had been “a beautiful day”.
And if you managed to cut the grass between showers, there was talk of a heatwave.
I seem to have inherited this.
When someone mentions the amount of rain in Donegal, I immediately become defensive.
“Ah, but that’s why it’s so green.”
This is our standard response.
Nobody ever says this about Singapore.
We then explain that Donegal rain is different.
“It’s only soft rain.”
Soft rain is rain that gets you completely wet without having the decency to make enough noise for you to go indoors.
Then there is drizzle.
Drizzle is what we call rain when admitting it is raining would be unnecessarily negative.
We have dozens of descriptions.
A bit damp.
A wee shower.
Misty.
Close.
Changeable.
Fresh.
“A wee drop came down earlier.”
That last one may refer to three hours of continuous rainfall.
Galway people are exactly the same.
Tell someone from Galway that it rains a lot there and they will immediately start explaining the benefits.
“It keeps the place green.”
Yes.
And presumably Noah’s flood was excellent for the garden.
The strange thing is that tourists seem much more realistic about the whole business.
They arrive prepared.
Waterproof jackets. Waterproof trousers. Walking boots. Hats. Backpacks covered in fluorescent rain covers.
They look as though they are preparing to invade Norway.
Meanwhile, the locals are standing outside in ordinary shoes saying, “I don’t think that’ll come to much.”
The tourists knew it might rain.
They didn’t come to Donegal for two weeks of guaranteed sunshine.
If they wanted sunshine, cheap beer and a sunbed beside a swimming pool, they would have gone to Spain.
They came for cliffs, beaches, mountains, empty roads and scenery that makes you stop the car every five miles.
And, to be fair, Donegal does look magnificent after rain.
This is fortunate.
Because there is usually some.
When the sun eventually appears, we become ridiculously excited.
“Look at that!”
We point at ordinary fields.
“The way the light is catching that hill!”
Five minutes earlier, the hill wasn’t visible.
This probably explains why we tolerate the weather.
We have accepted that there is no point arguing with the Atlantic Ocean. It has been throwing weather at us for thousands of years and appears to have plenty left.
So we complain constantly while defending it against outsiders.
This is not just about weather.
It is how county loyalty works.
We are entitled to criticise our own people.
We can say terrible things about someone locally.
“He was always a bit odd.”
“His brother’s worse.”
“Sure, you’d never know what that family were at.”
But if somebody from Dublin says the same thing, the mood changes immediately.
“Ah now. He’s actually a decent enough man.”
Suddenly, the entire county has closed ranks.
We may not particularly like him.
We may have spent the previous twenty minutes explaining why.
But he’s ours.
And that is the important thing.
In the end, that is why people stay attached to places like Donegal, Galway, Mayo and all the other counties where the weather occasionally attempts to kill tourism.
It isn’t just scenery.
It is knowing people.
Knowing who their parents were.
Knowing who they married.
Knowing who they nearly married.
And knowing, without any particular reason, that their grandfather fell out with your grandfather sometime around 1963.
It is the slow pace, the slagging, the stories, the neighbours and the craic.
It is driving through rain for forty minutes, reaching the coast just as the clouds break and saying:
“Would you get a better place than this?”
And the answer, of course, is no.
Although my aunt might have had a different view.
Especially if she’d just spent two weeks trying to dry towels.
