i Introduction Constructing the history of climate and society in Ireland James Kelly and Tomás Ó Carragáin In Ireland, as elsewhere on the planet, the proliferation in recent years of extreme weather events has amplified interest in the reconstruction of an accurate history of climate and weather. Yet, as John Sweeney explains in his contribution to this collection (chapter 13) in which he traces the appreciation in ‘societal awareness’ of climate change, appreciation of its implications emerged slowly. Indeed, though the nineteenth-century Irish born scientist John Tyndall was one of the first to identify the warming effects of greenhouses gases, ‘climate change was not deemed a serious issue in Ireland…at either the academic or public level for a number of years’ after the establishment (at the instigation of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)) in 1988 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was not a tenable position, given the weight of scientific evidence pointing to the acceleration in ‘global warming’, but the Irish scholarly community was poorly positioned to identify the likely implications as climate modelling was still in its infancy and the research infrastructure required to investigate the phenomenon was basic at best. Moreover, the meteorologists, climate geographers and others who were in the vanguard of inquiry in this respect could not appeal to the history of climate in Ireland either for context or direction since the discipline of History seemed disinterested , while Geography did not prioritise historical climate inquiry. By comparison , archaeologists and scholars in cognate disciplines afforded it more prominence in their narratives, though their hypotheses were rarely demonstrable evidentially. The modern study of Ireland’s climate can be said to have been inaugurated in the mid-seventeenth century with Gerard Boate (1604–50) who engaged with the subject in a number of sections of his pioneering ‘Natural history’, which was published posthumously in 1652.1 Boate’s account was necessarily brief and impressionistic, but it established weather and climate as key environmental issues requiring investigation, and they feature among the wide array of matters that elicited the attention of the Dublin Philosophical Society, which constitutes the doi: https://doi.org/10.3318/PRIAC.2020.120.14 1 Gerard Boate, A natural history of Ireland (London, 1652). A later edition of the work was published in 1755. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 120C, i–x © 2020 Royal Irish Academy James Kelly and Tomás Ó Carragáin ii most striking manifestation of the engagement with the ‘new learning’ that is identifiable in Ireland in the later decades of the seventeenth century.2 Notable though this was, it was both less systematic and less successful in the generation of useful data than that pursued in the eighteenth century by the Dublin-based physician John Rutty (1697–1775), who, mirroring the appreciating interest in the subject that can be identified in England and elsewhere in Europe, had recourse to ‘a raingauge and a crude sponge-hygrometer’ as well as his own observation as he pursued his lifelong inquiry into the influence and impact of the weather on health and wellbeing.3 Rutty was, as this implies, primarily interested in the weather for therapeutic reasons, but his published work spawned few imitators, with the notable exception of the scientist, Richard Kirwan (1733–1812). This might reasonably be characterised as a lost opportunity, since Kirwan’s meteorological investigation overlapped with the establishment, in Armagh in 1790, of an astronomical observatory and, in Dublin in 1795, of the Royal Dublin Society’s Botanic Garden, both of which engaged in the systematic collection of weather data.4 The beginnings of the professionalising of such information aggregation, which accelerated in the nineteenth century, did not interrupt the parallel collection by individuals of their own data or the maintenance of weather diaries, though it is only now that these documents are being identified and scrutinised for what they reveal of the history of climate and weather and how the latter phenomena shaped and influenced the lives of people.5 The increased amount of space devoted to reporting the weather in newspapers, which also emerged as an identifiable trend in the final decades...