Apples don’t fall far from the tree. My son Max is an even bigger weather nerd than me. Recently, he was trawling deep within the archives of the excellent Met Éireann website when he came upon a find that he knew would interest me. Well, both of us.

He had discovered rainfall records for Fraine, Athboy, which run continuously from 1850 to 2010, converted to metric readings by some diligent archivist in Met Éireann. I was as happy as a pig in poo when he forwarded the link to me. History and weather combined – great stuff.

Fraine is only three miles from us, albeit with a bog in between. The bog is relevant as it seems to have an effect on the micro climate, in that it rains more in Fraine and Athboy than it does with us and my own overlapping records bear this out. The average annual rainfall over the 160 years is 895mm, whereas mine (albeit just for the last 16 years) is 838mm.

I could bog you down with all sorts of facts and figures which might have you quickly turning the page, so I won’t go there. Nonetheless, there are a few very striking facts that can be taken from these 160 years of figures.

We certainly live in a temperate maritime climate in Ireland with few extremes and the Athboy rainfall figures bear this out.

The wettest year was 1924 with 1,248mm – I’ll come back to this in a minute – and 1887 was the driest year with 615mm (Glasnevin still retains the all-time record-breaking, desert-like 356mm for 1887). But neither Athboy figure represents a significant deviation from the average, given the length of the period.

Before COVID-19 took over, RTE’s science correspondent George Lee made at least a weekly appearance on the television news, warning us of the perils of climate change. Extreme weather events would become more common and were a consequence of climate change.

Well frankly, I see nothing in these local rainfall figures that has anything to do with climate change. Both the extremes are all from 100 years ago, or more. Maybe mean temperatures would show a different picture, but rainfall does not.

I’d have thought this myself on many an occasion, but it’s clearly not true, at least in the Meath area. There were always wet and dry years and sometimes they come in a row and sometimes they don’t.

In that respect, these Athboy figures are very consoling. We shouldn’t read too much into the odd wet or dry year. The status quo soon returns. But unfortunately, these records confirm my fear. The Athboy rainfall records show that August is, on average, the wettest month of the year. I dread the arrival of August every year.

But to return to 1924, the wettest year of them all. It truly was the year from hell. The fledgling Irish Free State, having evolved through the War of Independence followed by the Civil War, was not in a great place, either economically or politically. Then the rain began after a dry February. All of the summer months were a washout.

Hay and turf was lost, the harvest was lost, potatoes rotted in the ground and people died of starvation. It was a true crisis.

What a different Ireland we live in today. A wet summer is a tad inconvenient for the general public – particularly if it’s meant to be a COVID-19 outdoorsy summer – but certainly nobody will go hungry. And, never mind the farmers, it’ll only make the news for what are now entirely predictable reasons.

Climate change. Again.