IF YOU’RE READING this from Ireland’s east coast then you too will know of the emotional toll that was taken as the sun unprecedentedly disappeared from the sky for 10 days. 

Naturally, we are all of us well accustomed to the Irish sky having the pallor of a used dishrag, but after 10 days straight the pressure had begun to build. Many social media users started marking the days without sunlight in the same way as a prisoner might notch each day of his sentence into the jailhouse wall. 

Do you know how long the sky has to be grey before Irish people even notice that they haven’t seen the sun in a while? We were born underneath cloud cover. We can be wet and not even register that it’s raining. For us, the sun usually visits us like a relative in prison, separated by a wall of thick glass, never able to fully embrace us. In Ireland, a statement like ‘the sky is blue’ should really be followed up with ‘in theory’. 

To learn that the 10 days leading up to this Wednesday had been the longest sunless streak seen in Dublin since 1942 probably came as a bit of a relief to thousands of people wondering why it had been so long since they’d felt the usual modicum of joy we’re permitted in the early months of the year. Thankfully, as the week wound down, the sun reemerged, we all breathed a deep sigh of relief, and remembered that everything else is kind of a mess as well. 

For example, 1992 Eurovision winner Linda Martin went on the radio this week and claimed that she was contemplating running for president later this year off the back of being approached by an unnamed political party. 

She may have been kidding, she may have been manifesting and trying to speak it into existence, she may just have been doing whatever John Connors was trying to do the other week when he went on telly to say that Love/Hate was coming back only for both RTÉ and Netflix to immediately shake their heads and be like: nah. 

But one of the very special things about the Irish presidency is how eminently plausible it seems that any public figure might throw their name in the hat. There’s really nobody whose name you’d hear and think ‘Oh, surely they wouldn’t run for president.’ At least nobody without a significant criminal background. And honestly, even then. 

Seriously, let’s try a thought experiment and see if you can imagine these Irish people running for president: Tommy Tiernan? No question about it. Brian O’Driscoll? No reason why not. Miriam O’Callaghan? People have been talking about it for years! Paula Lambert, the puppeteer behind Bosco? It’s not like you could rule it out. Any of our living Eurovision winners? Honestly any of our living Eurovision contestants, up to and including Dustin. Beloved digital columnist Carl Kinsella? Too young right now but eventually. 

I defy you to name an Irish person who has spent a cumulative total of 20 hours or more on television or radio since 1990 who could not feasibly run for president and don’t say Graham Linehan because he doesn’t count. Last time around we had no fewer than three contestants from Dragon’s Den! Sure, they all got absolutely pummelled by Michael D Higgins, but this isn’t about winning, it’s about running.

All of this is by way of saying that Linda Martin is well within her rights to float a presidential bid. The parties might be rushing to deny that they’ve encouraged her to do so but I think we all know that People Before Profit are just trying to play it coy before they eventually unleash Comrade President Linda upon us.

It could be worse of course, we could have a president who is upending the entire order of the postwar western world while he lets the world’s richest man dismantle his own country’s government. But hey, we have our own problems to be getting along with before the world inevitably falls apart in earnest. 

This week saw the government pilloried by many once again for its latest proposed ‘solution’ to the housing crisis (and trust me, those sarcastic little inverted commas are doing a lot of heavy lifting here). This week, it was proposed that certain regulations around letting people live in back garden sheds could be scrapped and that such ‘detached cabins’ and ‘modular style buildings’ could be exempt from planning permission. They didn’t use the word shed but they didn’t have to. We all know what they mean. 

Living in a ‘granny flat’ (one of the most unnecessarily unpleasant terms in the English language, by the way, calling to mind a grandmother who has been hit by a cartoon steamroller) might well work for some people. Doubtlessly it does — for the kind of people who have the space and the money to build such a thing on their property, and renters who are truly prepared to live a rather curtailed form of existence for a certain period of time.

In many cases, one would imagine that the kind of situation where this works best is when the child of a family who can afford such a development wants a bit more additional independence before graduating to the grown-up apartment that will cost them at least grand a month. Anyone who has ever spent a single evening searching for an apartment online, however, will know that many Irish landlords don’t even feel the need to make their traditional rentals especially liveable — which does not augur well for a situation that is less liveable to begin with.

For years now we’ve seen ‘apartments’ advertised with bedframes pressed up against ovens, listings where renters aren’t even entitled to be in the property all week, and any other indignity you can dream of.  Living in someone’s back garden runs an even higher risk of such deficiencies, unless you’re a gnome, and even they probably dream of making it into your house one day.

In the midst of all this, the Irish Home Builders’ Association this week said it does not believe house completions will increase this year. Given that last year’s housing targets by were missed by 10,000, that is a concern. More like a full-blown catastrophe actually. The idea that we are still pussyfooting around the issue after all these years is demoralising beyond belief, and has surely been the leading push factor behind a wave of emigration. 

It doesn’t take a Rory Hearne or an Eoin Ó Broin to know that teasing the end of rent pressure zones or pointing at a four-walled structure in a garden and calling it a house will not solve the housing crisis by any stretch, or at least not by any of the metrics employed by, you know, people on normal salaries who are looking to buy a home.

But look on the bright side! At least it’s going to be easier to break the news to this middle-class family whose shed I’ve secretly been living in for the last few years. Wish me luck.