MET ÉIREANN DOESN’T always help itself. Its Dublin headquarters, for example, is a threatening brutalist rhombus that does look like it houses some kind of doomsday device. Sometimes they also get the weather wrong, and while that is their main job, it’s also kind of hard to blame them for that. That we, as apes, are able to predict the weather with such accuracy strikes me as sort of miraculous. 

It’s notable, therefore that in the case of this cold snap, Met Éireann have called it exactly right. They said it would be cold, and it’s cold. There is very little more we can ask of the people whose job it is to tell us whether or not it will be cold. Nevertheless, some elected officials have taken the B*Witched approach and blamed it on the weatherman (there is no rule preventing me from making a pop culture reference 26 years too late).

On Thursday, Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín tweeted: “I know that the Irish people love talking about the weather, but issuing a status Orange low temperature warning for a temperature of -5 is crazy. People should take care on the roads & mind older friends & family but this is not abnormal winter weather.”

I know that the Irish people love talking about the weather,

but issuing a status Orange low temperature warning for a temperature of -5 is crazy.

People should take care on the roads & mind older friends & family but this is not abnormal winter weather.

— Peadar Tóibín TD (@Toibin1) January 8, 2025

This way of thinking – that Met Éireann’s weather warnings are in some way a problem for Irish society – has been around for at least a few years now. Tóibín, however, is perhaps the first mainstream politician to give voice to this crank view. Even his short tweet alone contains the phenomenal irony of decrying the idea of a weather warning in one sentence while advising the public to take care on the roads and mind their older friends and family in the next. 

What do these people want, exactly? Would they rather be surprised each morning when they look out the window and realise that their windshield is covered in frost, their tires might not be up to scratch and the roads are icy to the point of being impassable? Surely we can all agree that it’s better to be kept as informed as possible with the goings on of the weather, lest we fall asleep naked with the windows open and wake up screaming from the cold at 4am.

One suspects that Tóibín might know well what he’s doing. He has been a TD for a decade and a half, he has chaired Oireachtas committees, he knows the importance of the government and local authorities and public services and the public at large being furnished with all of the facts they need to competently make decisions. One wonders then if this ‘Old Man Yells At Cloud’ routine was more of an attempt to marshal the forces of a demographic much dumber than he is. An effort to win the allegiance of conspiratorial thinkers who have somehow pieced it together that Status Orange weather warnings fit into a grand plan whereby the brainiacs at Met Éireann control what we do and when we do it, forcing us to avoid unnecessary journeys and cancelling hospital appointments for the sheer thrill of it. They are a fiendish bunch, the meteorologists. 

But ultimately, as you fill your 20th hot water bottle of the week and wince thinking about the heating bill that’s coming down the line, you realise that such grousing makes more sense when it doesn’t fly in the face of what we can see with our own eyes and feel with our own deathly cold skin.

It is cold, after all. Is it not cold? Am I wrong? How is this an argument? It’s freezing, mate. I’m freezing. Are you not freezing? I’m so cold that I’ve basically ended up writing an entire column about how cold it is, and I’m writing it from one of the least cold parts of the country. That’s to say nothing of tens of thousands of homes across Ireland left without power at various points throughout the week, parts of Kerry are without water, power or heating, and a community of farmers in the Galtees who have literally had to dig their sheep out of the snow. 

And what would the benefit to us all be, exactly, if we were no longer warned about the weather? Can somebody explain that to me? What exactly would be the advantage of suspending the warning system? Is it that we would all feel tougher? During a week when Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his media platform would no longer partner with fact-checkers, it’s more important than ever that public representatives don’t set out to undermine valid warnings with implications for public health, safety and infrastructure. 

Though there is no comparison to be made in terms of severity, it’s dumbfounding that anyone could be watching the world experience extremes of weather, such as the wildfires that are ravaging Los Angeles this week, and conclude: “You know what? I think if anything we should be less prepared.”

That’s Micheál Martin under the chicken

Damian Eagers Photography Damian Eagers Photography

In other news, it is more than six weeks since the general election, we are still without a government. This week, both Micheál Martin and Simon Harris — who will share the role of Taoiseach in an as-yet unspecified way — both said they’d like to have the government up and running by 22 January, so as not to give Donald Trump too much of a headstart after his inauguration. They have both also accepted that this might not happen, which would fit quite well with the ‘set target, miss target’ approach of the Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael power-sharing era.

Martin seems unbothered, however, and is making good use of his last few weeks of freedom by visiting the BT Young Scientist exhibition and donning a chicken mask. It is a move he will almost certainly regret if there’s ever an outbreak of bird flu in Ireland, but for now it kind of leaves him impenetrable. What is there to say about a man about to assume the highest office in the land who’s prepared to wear a rubber chicken over his face? If anything we should be worried that Martin incorporates the chicken mask into his permanent persona, like a WWE heel or a Batman villain, wearing it during state visits and using it to intimidate the Regional Independents Group into submission. 

Still, the tradition of public officials turning up to celebrate Ireland’s young scientific minds is to be welcomed. Just as long as we don’t let Peadar Tóibín near any of the weather projects.