“There were nights as if I was on a fishing boat at sea; house lights dipping through the washing of rain and wind blowing salty in the throat.” (Ernie O’Malley, On Another Man’s Wound)

“Darkness came quickly. I spread out my map on the ground while I searched for matches. Rain fell. I heard the noise of bicycle chains; men halted to talk outside the hedge. They were police. Raindrops pattered off my map; the drops sounded like revolver shots.” (Ibid)

“Gaol was at first a half-world of bone-cold, smells, muddy light, and crushing walls … Rain would pelt off the walls and wind swirl and scream; both were cheerful sounds now.” (Ibid)

“It seemed to us that the rainfall was becoming more offensive with each succeeding year and an occasional pauper was drowned on the very mainland from the volume of water and celestial emesis which poured down upon us; a non-swimmer was none too secure in bed in these times.” (Myles na gCopaleen, The Poor Mouth.”)

“Great rivers flowed by the doorway and, if it be true that the potatoes were all swept from our fields, it is also a fact that fish were often available by the wayside as a nocturnal exchange. Those who reached their beds safely on dry land, by the morning found themselves submerged. At night people often perceived canoes from the Blaskets going by and the boatmen considered it a poor night’s fishing which did not yield them a pig or a piglet from Corkadoragha in their nets. (Ibid)

“One day, I put the matter to the Old-Fellow … Do you think, oh gentle person, said I, that we’ll ever again be dry? I really don’t know, oh mild one, said he, but if this rain goes on …’tis my idea that the fingers and toes of the Gaelic paupers will be closed and have webs on them like the ducks from now on …” (Ibid)

“The black herds of the rain were grazing/In the gap of the pure cold wind.” (Austin Clarke)

“My hills hoard the bright shillings of March/While the sun searches in every pocket.” (Patrick Kavanagh)

“A number of botanists had foregathered at Roundstone, and the particular occasion was a kind of symposium on bogs, held in the middle of one of the wettest of them … We stood in a ring in the shelterless expanse while discussion raged on the application of the terms soligenous, topogenous, and ombrogenous; the rain and wind, like our discussion, waxed in intensity, and under the unusual super-incumbent weight, whether of mere flesh and bone or of intellect, the floating surface of the bog slowly sank till we were all half-way up to our knees in brown water.” (Robert Lloyd Praegar, The Way That I Went)

“The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. (Heinrich Boll, Irish Journal)

“Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick.” (Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes)

“The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year’s Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges. It provoked cures galore … From October to April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried; tweed and woollen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations.” (Ibid)

“The rain drove us into the church – our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest drone, while steam rose again from our clothes to mingle with the sweetness of incense, flowers and candles … Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.” (Ibid)

“Oh, the water/Oh-oh, the water/Oh, the water/Hope it don’t rain all day.” (Van Morrison, And It Stoned Me)

“And you know you gotta go/Catch that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row/Throwing pennies at the bridges down below/In the rain, hail, sleet, and snow.” (Van again, Madame George)

“My mental pictures of wild Connacht weather would furnish a municipal gallery, each of them framed in gilt and called something like ‘Tempest in Mayo’. The storm the other night would have suited Turner to a ‘T’: in the fierce headlights of a friend’s minibus, it swarmed about us in flourishes of silver, in washes of ochre and umber … The road seethed with water. It poured from every gap in the ditch, spilled from every hill stream, hummocked out of boreens.” (Michael Viney, A Year’s Turning)

“I took shelter from a shower/And I slipped into your arms/On a rainy night in Soho/The wind was whispering all its charms.” (The Pogues)

“Dublin in the rain is mine/A pregnant city with a Catholic mind.” (Fontaines DC)

“Rain, rain, go away, come again another day/Rain, rain, go to Spain, never show your face again.” (Anonymous)

“Avoid unnecessary journeys” (Teresa Mannion, RTÉ News)