"O Gift incomparable on this Earth from God! O grace divinely bestowed upon us mortals, inestimable, yet not appreciated! We can safely take our rest in the open air, or upon bare marble. We have no fear of any breeze, piercing in its coldness, or fever-laden with its heat, or pestilential in what it might bring down on us."
What a splendid rebuttal of Kevin Myers's not entirely unprovoked attack on Irish weather in The Irish Times on Wednesday. The author is Giraldus Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales, a medieval commentator on the Irish climate whose Topographia Hiberniae paints a different picture.
"This is the most temperate of all countries," according to Giraldus. "Summer does not here drive you to take shade from its burning heat; nor does the cold of winter send you rushing to the fire. You will seldom see snow here, and even then it lasts only for a short time. The air is so healthy that there is no disease-bearing cloud, nor pestilential vapour or corrupting breeze."
Giraldus Cambrensis was one of the most colourful and formidable clerics of his generation. He was born around 1146 in Pembrokeshire in Wales, a member of a prominent Norman family who participated in King Henry II's incursion into Ireland.
Over the years Giraldus refused several bishoprics, hoping at some point to be offered what he considered the greatest prize of all, the Primacy of Wales; the king, however, was loath to install a Welshman as his Bishop of St David's.
Ultimately, Giraldus achieved no higher office than the Archdiaconate of Brecon, but he played a very prominent part in his eventful times, and visited Ireland on a number of occasions. Hence his book.
Despite his generally upbeat tone on Irish weather, Giraldus seems to concede that Kevin Myers has a point: "For this country more than any other suffers from storms of wind and rain. A north-west wind, along with the west wind to its south, prevails here, and is more frequent and violent than any other. It bends in the opposite direction, or uproots, nearly all the trees in the west that are in elevated places."
He noted, too, that "there is such a plentiful supply of rain, such an ever-present overhanging of the clouds and fog, that you will scarcely see, even in summer, three consecutive days of really fine weather".
But ever the optimist, Giraldus concludes: "Nevertheless, there is no disturbance of the air or inclemency of the weather that should inconvenience those who are in good health and spirits, or distress those that may suffer from disorders of the nervous kind."