Most parts of the west of Ireland collect 1,000 to 1,200mm of rain in the average year, with around 2,000mm being the norm in the Kerry, Donegal and Galway mountains. The eastern part of the country experiences falls of between 750 and 1,000mm, while a few places just to the north of Dublin have a little less. If the total Irish rainfall were evenly distributed over the island, the nation-wide average would be about 1,150mm - or sufficient to provide a layer of water slightly less than 4ft deep.
William Bulfin was an expert on the subject. He was the author, you may recall, of Rambles in Eirinn, a travel memoir that cannot be said to have dated very well but which at one time had an honoured place on every Irish bookshelf.
Few of us beyond a certain age have escaped the youthful tedium of ploughing through its zestful pages.
As he travelled the length and breadth of Ireland on his bicycle, little escaped Bulfin's beady eye and thoughtful observation. But he is particularly percipient, and sometimes even lyrical, on our Irish weather and, most especially, our rain.
"Irish rain of the summer and autumn," he asserts, "is a kind of damp poem. It is a soft, apologetic, modest kind of rain, as a rule; and even in its wildest moods, it gives you the impression that it is treating you as well as it can under the circumstances."
The rain in Ireland, Bulfin goes on, "does not come heralded by dust and thunder, and accompanied by lightning and roaring tempests, like the rain of the tropics; nor does it wet you to the bones in five minutes. You scarcely know when it begins. It grows on you by degrees. It comes on the scene veiled in soft shadows and hazes, and maybe a silver mist."
After the arrival of the first tentative drop, he says, "another comes presently, and you feel it on your cheek. Then a few more come. Then the rest of the family encircle you shyly. They are not cold or heavy or splashy. They fall on you as if they were coming from the eyes of many angels weeping for your sins.
"They caress you rather than pelt you, and they are laden with perfume from the meadow flowers, or the glistening trees, or the sweet, rich earth, or the heathery bogland."
"They soak you all the same," says Bulfin of our quasi-gentle Irish raindrops: "They fold you in, and make of you a limp, sodden, and unsightly thing, for all their soft embraces."