Weather Report: Good Friday Week, 1998

Chris Agee Weather Report: Good Friday Week, 1998 Afternoon weather was the metaphor. On the Tuesday before the talks deadline ofThursday, April 9th, set by Tony Blair early in his premiership, it had cleared suddenly to a deep and flawless azure more like Provence than Ireland. Inside the talks, however, all was gloom. The Unionists were declining to accept the draft agreement-prepared by the British and Irish governments and presented through Senator George Mitchell, the American chairman of the talks-as the basis for a final constitutional settlement . Predicting Thursday's outcome would, clearly, be as chancy as prophesying the next hour's processional of cloud-laden, Turneresque moods. Wednesday was the archetypical Irish "dirty day": wet, bleak, gray. The Belfast hills were topped by tourbillons oflow mist. By late afternoon, the usual mizzle-mist or sporadic shower had turned to a heavy downpour. But at the talks, adjacent to the old parliament at Stormont near Belfast, the mood was brightening. It was just possible that a settlement ending the ThirtyYears Stalemate of the "Troubles," and the most important political beginning since Partition in 1920, was on the cards. Ireland has what meteorologists call an "oceanic" climate, particularly in the North. It is swept by the restless vagaries of North Atlantic isobars. Here the trade winds, currents, and tempests from the circumnavigations of the Gulf Stream make their far-western European landfall. The phosphorescent flares of New England trawler nets and the smooth brown pods of the Caribbean bean litter the tidelines of Mayo. Year round, Irish weather is soft, clement, raindrenched , and fickle; whereas that of its latitudinal twin, Newfoundland, with its Arctic winter and fleeting summertime, is harsh and intemperate, a New World Siberia. Where one might dig deep in bog in Ireland, there is tundra and permafrost in Labrador. Precipitation and changeability: therein lies the glory of Irish weather. Like the unique air of a culture or period, or some autochthonous ecology of light and wet, the island's weather is full of its own special blend of shimmerings and dazzles. Ireland lacks both the true wintriness that frequents Scotland and the continental warmth ofthe South of England at high summer. Sea-girt and sea-buffeted, it is shielded from the extremes of the great Eurasian landmass. NEW HIBERNIA REVJEW/IRJS EIREANNACH NUA, 4:3 (AUTUMN/FOMHAR, 2000), 9-16 Weather Report: Good Friday Week, 1998 It seldom freezes for long and is never sultry in the meridional sense. Snow is rarely more than a shallow icing. If it lacks the steady warmth and illumination of Mediterranean claritas, or the crisp resolutions of North American seasons , Ireland has its own its medicine bag, its own Ariel, for meteorological enchantments. Above all, Irish weather throbs and shines when sunlight meets the endless impressionism of ocean moisture. Cloud shadows mountain. Hailshowers in sunlight. A rainbow amid storm-darkenings over Belfast Lough. Dusk and raindrops spangling the shimmy of a window like a bird's breast. Moon adrift in scud or rack, sunshafts fingering curtains of mist. Droplets on clover as tensile as the tremblings of quicksilver. It is an atmospheric dazzle you often glimpse in that Vermeer of sensation, Seamus Heaney: buffetings, dews, frosts, hailstones , rinsings, lightenings, "glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air;' and other "subtle little wets." Or even, on occasion, in Samuel Beckett, in the brightening recollection ofblue skies knotting the grain ofhis parables. Thursday, the decisive day, dawned oceanic. Cottony dirigibles arose in the east and steamed over. It shone, darkened, gusted, showered; a stream of cycles. When my late afternoon workout finished and I stepped from the gym in the cloud-capped shadow of Black Mountain, a splatter of hail was falling in bright sunlight. It bounced and settled on a grass verge dotted with speedwell. Endgame time. Turning the ignition, I looked forward to the evening's television. On the news the consensus was that a deal, despite impediments, was in the offing. It was the beginning of an astounding moment: modern Ireland's psychic Appomattox, though-crucially-no one was surrendering. From then on the Irish channels-BBC Northern Ireland, Ulster Television, Radio Telefis Eireann -suspended scheduling and went live. A succession...

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