Seán Moncrieff: What is it with young people wearing shorts in the cold and rain?

In the days when it was okay to tell your children to shut up, I was often told to shut up: particularly when the nine o’clock news was about to come on the telly. Yet I can’t recall my parents ever getting through a bulletin in silence.

My mother would bark, “Shush! The news is coming on.” Yet as soon as the newsreader started speaking, she would start tutting in reaction to what they said; then pivot to a related subject, then start speaking about something that had nothing to do with the news at all. Invariably, my father would point out that she had expressed a desire for quiet, which would lead to them bickering for the next 20 minutes.

But a sudden and dramatic quiet would erupt when it was time for the weather, in truth, the news was only a prelude to the main event. I can’t tell you why this was. They weren’t farmers, or gardeners or amateur meteorologists, yet knowledge of the next day’s weather conditions seemed of vital importance to them.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. This kind of thing happened in most households in Ireland; and the Irish have long puzzled as to why the Irish seem so obsessed with weather. It could be the changeable climate we have, or some sort of embedded folk memory; back to the time when rain, sun and snow had religious, agricultural and life-or-death ramifications.

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If it’s the latter, then it has survived with me. Travelling to work involves a fair amount of walking, so I need to know how to dress accordingly. I check the Met Éireann website every day and through experience I’ve learned to make educated guesses about when Met Eireann seems to be making educated guesses. Most of the time, I get it right.

As a result, in my household I’m the one everyone asks, will it rain tomorrow? But that’s the wrong question. It’s Ireland. Of course it’s going to rain. Probably.

For me, dressing appropriately means wearing a coat with a hood (my mother would be delighted with this). I don’t carry an umbrella. The correct question to ask about tomorrow’s weather isn’t about rain, but wind. Ireland is windy and it can come at you from all sorts of unexpected directions. Every day I see bedraggled pedestrians who naïvely believed an umbrella would protect that nice work suit. But an umbrella is useless if the rain is coming at you horizontally. It gets turned inside out, often snaps and ends up in landfill.

More baffling are the people who seem to be totally unaware of what kind of weather we have in this country. Storm Betty or Eunice rolls across Ireland and I see people on the Dart in shorts and tee-shirts, utterly startled that we don’t have a Mediterranean climate, a horror moving across their faces as they realise that their outfit will be ruined; that it will probably end up in landfill. Beside all the umbrellas.

I baulk at being ageist about this, but I’m left with no option. As I’ve witnessed it, this cohort are 100 per cent younger people. Members of the letter generations. You can’t help but wonder how they remain so steadfastly insulated from advance warning on the weather. Perhaps the tribal memory no longer remains within them: or, more likely, it remains dormant and will only be woken by repeated exposure to the nine o’clock news. But they don’t watch the nine o’clock news. They’re all TikTok and Instagram and think the stuff the old people look at and read is irrelevant to the modern world.

But if you’re young and reading this, or, more likely, if you know young people and you can tell them about it, try saying this: mainstream media. Give it a go. It’ll save you getting your clothes wrecked.