Annie Moynihan, local sage and weather forecaster ahead of her time

WELL, lads, let me tell ye, I didn’t sleep much last Thursday or Friday nights - hardly a wink, to be truthful!

We were playing a County hurling semi-final on Saturday and normally such an upcoming fixture could well cause me restless and fitful sleep deprivation.

But no, on this occasion my darkened waking was in no such way influenced - we lost the match but shure that’s sport, we have to take the ups and the downs.

Wait ’til I explain what happened last week. On Wednesday, we went away on our annual autumn break - for a day and a half, to glorious West Cork. So, Thursday morning last, we were in a scenic spot in the mystical land of Beara. A beautiful, crisp but sunny autumnal morning, and no cows to be milked - sheer bliss!

We stopped at a busy restaurant for a mid-morning coffee. Ah yes, tasty coffee and the livin’ was aisy and we were in no great hurry home. You know the way you’d be, sipping away and by pure chance you’d hear a conversation from the next table or from across the way. That’s exactly what happened a week ago.

We just couldn’t help overhearing a lady on her mobile phone - not just one conversation but several. What was so strange was that, while we were there - for maybe 15 minutes - this lady of roughly our own sexagenarian vintage, made about five calls - to different people but with the same message!

Her mantra to those she spoke to - obviously family, friends or casual acquaintances, was that last Saturday, September 25, was “going to be a day we will never forget”.

She spoke calmly, if somewhat loudly to each of her recipients. After exchanging the usual pleasantries about the weather and such like, she went on to tell all and sundry ‘next Saturday will be one day that no person will ever forget, not the end of the world, mind, but all systems electrical, banking and computers will crash all over the world. Even the Prime Minister of New Zealand has warned people about what’s going to happen’.

Her listeners obviously questioned her at length as to the source of her remarkable prediction, but she just replied in a matter of fact manner: “I am just letting ye know, so make arrangements because Saturday will never, ever be forgotten.”

Initially, on hearing the dire warning, I kinda laughed to myself and slipped away slowly. Again and again, she dialled different contacts and repeated the same dire warnings. She wasn’t in terror or trying to frighten others - well, it seemed that way to me anyway, a casual listener.

As we got up to leave and pay, she was still sitting there - silently smiling now. I was in two minds to ask her where her powers of telling the future came from, but sometimes silence is the best option.

Well, lads, on Friday and Saturday I bought and read more newspapers than would wallpaper an airport - looking furtively and curiously in the ‘Foreign News’ sections for some clues, but nothing was forthcoming!

I even ‘googled’ Jacinta Ardern (PM of NZ) to see had she made any recent futuristic and/or fatalistic pronouncements. All I found was a statement she made to Parliament about the price of mutton - not really much of an omen of any impending doom!

Anyway, I worked away on Friday and Saturday (after ne’er a wink of shut-eye) but still with a sense of foreboding and uncertainty. Saturday came and went, as I say we lost the hurling match, but as the clock passed midnight I was able to sleep fairly soundly once more - it was strange as the feeling of deja vu finally passed.

I saw that Nostradamus, the master of telling the future, predicted the Queen would die and her successor wouldn’t stay long on the throne. The problem about the French philosophers predictions are that different ‘translations’ and ‘interpretations’ have been published down the centuries. Depending on what ‘Edition’ you read, William or Harry are shortly to become monarch - I’m just sorry I didn’t ask the lady in West Cork for her views on that Royal conundrum!

The best woman I ever knew to make predictions - especially about the weather - was an old neighbour of ours, Annie Moynihan. 

Born in Donegal, she grew up speaking Irish in a district of her native county where the sea, the mountains and the wind all determined the way the weather would vary.

In fairness to our Met Office, in recent years their ability to forecast the weather - brilliantly in the short term and good on the long term - is most beneficial. I speak specifically from a farmer’s point of view where weather conditions dictate agricultural activity and profitability.

The recent well-signalled heatwave saw the country basking in Mediterranean type sunshine. It was great, though we ended up doing ‘rain dances’ (with our clothes on - no point in frightening the cows!) as the grass disappeared.

In olden times, the ability to tell the weather - even just for a few days - was essential for vital tasks like hay-making and harvesting. Annie Moynihan was widely consulted around here. When a wet day or a sunny, breezy day meant the difference in saving the hay or not, knowledge was vital. Where she lived, Mrs Moynihan could observe the Galtee, Knockmealdown and Comeragh mountains in the distance. From her earliest years she was taught how to observe - look, listen and interpret what ‘the signs’ were telling her.

Many of us will know about the swallows flying low, the cat coming in and curling up near the fire scratching behind the ear, the smoke from the chimney curling down to the ground -all portents of rain and bad weather.

‘Rain in May fills the haggard with corn and hay. A wet May and a windy June makes the Farmer whistle a merry tune’ - sayings like these were handed down from generation to generation and are as true today as when first coined, maybe 300 years ago.

Mrs Moynihan never claimed any gifts of wisdom or prophecy, no she simply closely studied nature and all its vagaries. If the grass was bending low from a breeze coming from one direction, she knew a storm was imminent. Similarly, she understood the actions and reactions of animals and poultry.

Though these wrongly named ‘dumb animals’ can neither speak nor write, they have an innate inner sense and intelligence far more sensitive than us humans. Remember a few years back when a tsunami was about to strike in Indonesia, many of the ‘wild’ animals living on the coastline fled to higher ground in advance of the massive waves.

Annie Moynihan had a huge store of sayings - why, oh why, didn’t we write them all down! 

Gems of wisdom like ‘When the cuckoo calls from a leafless thorn, sell your cow and buy corn’ sum up in a sentence a whole philosophy, giving advice for the remainder of the year to farming folk.

Michele de Nostredame and Old Moore (Theophilus Moore) are both renowned for their predictions, though Old Moore had Dublin winning Sam this year! I perused both ‘books’ this past week but neither of the boys said who’d win the County Hurling Final ‘tween the Barrs and the Rockies - sorry I am now that I didn’t get the phone number of that erstwhile ‘prophetess’ we met in West Cork last week!

I have oak and ash trees growing together over in the Glen near the Blessed Well. Old people swore that a wet or fine summer was always correctly predicted by the timing of the first buds to appear on these trees. When the ash tree produced early buds, ‘twas a sign of a wet year, whereas if the reverse happened all we’d have was a few showers:

If the ash should bud before the oak,

Then we’re sure to have a soak,

If the oak should bud before the ash,

Then we’ll only have a splash.