An Irishman's Diary

According to the French Revolutionary Calendar, we are now emerging from Pluviôse - the Month of Rain - and entering Ventôse, the Month of Wind. But two centuries of climate change on, the weather is not quite conforming to revolutionary theory.

The last day of Pluviôse (yesterday) was glorious, as was most of the month. And although the forecast is for a cloudy and damp start to Ventôse today, winds are predicted to be moderate for the foreseeable future.

Far from rainy, to date this has been a February to restore your faith in another calendar: the Celtic. In most years, the notion that February 1st is the start of spring - still popular, especially among those of us born on that date - receives little support from the elements. But a succession of brilliant, frosty mornings and hazy, sunlit days has given the idea renewed credibility this year. The snowdrops and daffodils seem to have fallen for it, anyway.

Not everybody welcomes the sun, of course. It can be very bad news if you're engaged in the manufacture or sale of artificial light products, for example - something they were very conscious of in post-revolutionary France. Indeed, in 1845, a famous French economist called Frédéric Bastiat made this very point when he urged his government to adopt protectionist measures against imports of solar origin.

He was not entirely serious. On the contrary, Bastiat was a free-trade enthusiast, suspicious of all state intervention. So his "Petition from the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, Sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting" had subversive intent. Even so, there must have been many in the industry happy to take his words at face value.

Here, he outlines the nub of the alleged problem: "We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation.

"This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

"We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds - in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat."

Bastiat's joke was partly on us. The sun's respect for "that haughty island" has extended, traditionally, to a less haughty island further west. So, despite being at heart a Mediterranean people, we Irish have also found ourselves condemned to live in a befogged, rain-sodden climate, where competition from the sun is the least of our manufacturers' worries.

Those with a vested interest in such weather have included not just the light industry, but also the holiday companies, who make big profits from flying us to places where the supply of cheap solar power is more reliable. It must be bad news for them too, therefore, that the sun has broken the embargo so thoroughly this February: unveiling its spring range of products and dumping them all over a grateful Ireland.

Meanwhile, in A case of life imitating 19th-century satire, the candle-makers of Europe have marked the first weeks of 2008 by lobbying Brussels for help to make them more competitive. The focus of their complaints is not the sun - about which, realistically, they can do nothing. No, the continent's candle-makers are targeting the solar system's next biggest producer of low-cost lighting: China.

They're not the first to do this. Back in 2003, the US imposed duties against Chinese candle imports that were selling for much cheaper than anything American manufacturers could produce. Since when, China has turned its candles on Europe, rapidly gaining market share from the big German and Dutch manufacturers and threatening (it is claimed) 20,000 jobs.

Last year - "at their wick's end", as one of the wittier headlines put it - the indigenous companies formed the European Candle Institute to light a fire under the EU Trade Commissioner, Peter Mandelson. Now Mandelson has granted the group its first victory in the "wax wars". Last weekend, EU trade inspectors announced an investigation into the dumping of cut-price candles by China, opening the way for possible duties later this year.

The climate may be changing but, clearly, some things never do.

That faint wrenching sound you can hear in the corridors of Brussels is the ghost of Frédéric Bastiat pulling out what remains of his hair.