At about 5pm on Saturday evening I came home from the local shops and asked my wife whether, on reflection, she and I might be complete weirdos.
This potential revelation had dawned on me because, thankfully, I had just run in for some diesel, having let the car hit the red light on the tank, and had not been to the shops to buy bread, toilet paper, or sausages. All three products having been sold out, a rueful employee told me, by 11am on Saturday morning. “They (meaning the masses) just descended this morning”, the staff member, who I know fairly well, said. “I haven’t seen anything like it since Covid”.
Then shortly after getting home, I took a cursory flick through the news websites. The Irish Independent was leading with the news that the Taoiseach, Mr. Harris, had received an emergency briefing on the incoming weather. What exactly Mr. Harris is expected to do about the weather, nobody knows.
Just to be entirely sure that I hadn’t gone completely mad and missed news of an incoming famine, I then checked the weather forecast: There was indeed snow forecast for my area. Several inches of snow, in fact, and it duly arrived on Sunday morning. The forecast also said that the snow will abate on Monday and conditions will have substantially improved by Tuesday. In other words: A 48 hour window or so, in which travel might be difficult.
So why then, did the public of North Tipperary (and indeed other parts of the country) strip the shops bare of bread, sausages, and toilet rolls? Are my wife and I the weirdos for shrugging and getting on with it? How many trips to the bathroom can you even take in 48 hours, absent diarrhea?
Occasionally, in recent years, I’ve had occasion to feel like a foreigner in my own country. That was perhaps truest during covid, when the vast bulk of the Irish population bizarrely appeared to take pride in working hard to have what was then called “a meaningful Christmas” on account of a virus that – by that time – was very well established to be well short of lethal and indeed not much worse than flu in most people.
Then, last year, there was the continued and ongoing spectacle of Irish politicians, with the connivance and participation of much of the population, turning events in the middle east into some kind of alternative national religion or morality play in which the rest of the western world is a villain.
And then there’s the Late Late Toy show, in which a naff two-hour television programme is elevated – by those who converse in public, at least – into something of a state-mandated national celebration. I do my best to tune most of this out, but it does leave you with a sense of otherness. Of not quite being part of the national tribe, and feeling, I confess, very grateful for that fact.
Now, we have snow. Not much of it, mind you: Ten centimetres is the most it reached in some places. In parts of Maine, in New England, they get two metres of the stuff every Winter. They get on with it.
By contrast, what we saw across much of Ireland yesterday was “panic buying” in the truest sense of that term. That is to say, people were buying things because they were panicked. About the weather. They were purchasing foodstuffs in bulk, which suggests that at minimum, they were afraid of going hungry. This is an objectively irrational and illogical behaviour, which has taken hold of a substantial portion of the population. Enough of us were afraid of hunger – at least in this part of the country – to strip the shop shelves bare. This means that a substantial portion of the population is behaving irrationally.
Why is this? Over the years my working theory has become that Irish society – much more than those of comparable western countries – is disproportionately tribal. Our politics and media in particular are consensus based; our electoral system encourages herding of political parties around particular ideas; our history is taught – I emphasise that word taught – as being about the importance of uniting against the outsider and about an eight-hundred-year collective struggle. As Kevin Myers sometimes notes on these pages, we Irish have had no problem with killing each other in the name of maintaining a common tribal purpose. The most brutal punishments doled out by the IRA’s – both official and provisional – over the last century were not to the enemy, but to the perceived collaborator. For most (who am I kidding: all) of our history the biggest threat to an Irish person from other Irish people arose when you stepped outside the approved boundaries of tribalism.
It was more Irish and patriotic, after all, to starve during the great hunger than to accept your children being educated by Protestants (in some, not all cases) in return for sustenance. That was both objectively irrational, and such a source of national pride that “taking the soup” remains one of our most potent insults. “Buying the bread” will never quite reach it, though to my mind it really should.
And so, we’re in a strange place: I don’t think anybody in North Tipperary who was bulk-purchasing bread on Saturday morning had any genuine fear of hunger or starvation on foot of a winter snowfall. But I do think that bulk-buying bread made them feel part, on some psychological level, of a kind of collective national effort against the heavens. The Taoiseach was briefed, and is leading us in the battle against the snow.
He’s doing his part. Now, you do yours and stock up on the toilet roll.
As I say, it all makes me feel like a foreigner, in my own land.