Water and its (Dis)Contents

Abstract

It’s a foggy morning in Ireland as I begin this essay. The newspapers report weather warnings from the Meteorological Service as though fog were not an essential ingredient of winter here, not to mention part of our mythology and, some say, our personalities. The rose bushes outside my window, the bony birch and the watery hazel, the leaves on the lawn, the naked beeches are all shades of old gold. The ground is damp and soft underfoot because we have just come out of a prolonged period of gales and heavy rain. Everything outside my front door feels slightly damp. Even the air is, as we say, ‘close’. It is a soft morning in that age old Irish euphemism. The newspapers also report, a little breathlessly, the threat to our peace, the possibility of democracy in peril in this little republic, of revolution even. One TD for the right-wing Fine Gael Party1, has declared that the country is