Darach Ó Séaghdha Author and linguist

In Calling 353, a new series for The Journal, bestselling Motherfoclóir author and podcaster Darach Ó Séaghdha casts a linguistic eye on how we talk about what it means to be Irish, the signs we post to each other about Irishness – and what really lies beneath it all.

In September, Irish cinema audiences will have the opportunity to enjoy Pressure, a new motion picture about D-Day starring Andrew Scott, Brendan Fraser, Kerry Condon and many other talented actors. It is based on a much-admired play of the same name by David Haig, who you might recognise from Four Weddings & A Funeral (he was Bernard, the second groom) and Killing Eve.

The film and play Pressure revolve around the story of James Stagg, chief meteorologist to Dwight D Eisenhower, and how a disputed weather report could change the date that Operation Overlord would commence on. You might say that this is a very high pressure decision, and it relates to atmospheric pressure. Pressure is a pun here.

That’s all well and good in itself. The drama of the backroom meetings that led to a major military devision is now a tried and tested formula for an award-season movie. Oppenheimer, Zero Dark Thirty, and Lincoln have all followed this rainbow and found Oscar gold at the end.

Another trend in prestige movies this century has been to look at a moment in recent history and tell its story with an increased emphasis on the role of the women who were involved – Hidden Figures, Saving Mr Banks, and Hitchcock are just a few examples of this trend. Early reports suggest that Pressure will not be included in this category, as the role of Irish meteorologist Maureen Flavin Sweeney only gets a passing mention.

Erris Head to Malin Head

It’s unlikely that another Hollywood movie about the role of meteorologists in World War II is going to get made any time soon, so there’s a danger that Maureen Sweeney’s story may go untold. This would be a crying shame, especially as it’s a story that shines a light on a complex and still-relevant part of Irish history.

Maureen Flavin was born in Kerry in 1923 but moved to Mayo after school to take advantage of a spare room at her uncle’s pub at Blacksod. She found employment at the local post office, which also served as a weather station as readings from Blacksod Lighthouse could be dispatched from the post office’s telegram equipment.

Blacksod in Mayo may have felt a long way away from the war ravaging Europe in the 1940s. However, as the most westerly of Ireland’s weather stations, it had a head start in gathering information about coming storms. Whenever you hear them mention Erris Head on the weather report or the shipping area forecast, that was the point that Maureen was catching data for.

Ireland, newly independent and bruised from an economic war with the United Kingdom that had followed a bitter civil war, was in the process of uncoupling its meteorological resources from Britain’s Met Office, and by 1937 it had done so officially. Climate science by its nature has had an internationalist perspective, and two of the first employees of the Irish Met Office (it wasn’t named Met Éireann until 1996) were refugees from political turbulence in Europe: Leo Pollack from Czechoslovakia and Mariano Deporto from Spain.

There has been much speculation about what was and wasn’t on the table in negotiations between Britain and Ireland in the lead up to World War II. One thing that we can be sure of was that an agreement was reached in 1939 to submit hourly weather reports to the British Met Office – an agreement that was additionally significant as other lines of communication between Britain and the Free State were restricted on direct order from Churchill in March 1944.

The story goes that on Maureen’s 21st birthday in 1944 she submitted her weather readings by telegram as normal and was surprised to receive a phone call from a woman with English accent asking her if she could double-check the reading. She would not learn until 1956 that this outlier reading, predicting a storm on the English Channel, would lead to Eisenhower deciding to delay the Normandy landing.

In 2020, Sweeney received a medal from the House of Representatives in recognition of her contribution to world history.

A woman in STEM

Dublin City Council has a rule that a street or other place-name not be named after a person until 20 years after their death or until 100 years after their birth. This means that Maureen Flavin Sweeney now qualifies, and a landmark named in her honour could make her a household name the way Mary Elmes and Rosie Hackett now are.

Some might say that Flavin Sweeney was just doing her job and there’s nothing especially heroic about that, to which I’d respond that people who are “just doing there jobs” make life safe and bearable every day. And in a world where conspiracy theories and disingenuous cautions about life-saving medicine get rapidly circulated by people who “do their own research”, Flavin Sweeney was a woman with a secondary school education who applied high scientific standards to her work and found something significant that others missed.

We hear a lot about STEM from the perspective of badgering our children into careers that won’t be obsolete in twenty years, but what we don’t hear enough of is the ability of science, and the sharing of scientific information, to create bonds and lines of communication between groups of people who might not otherwise be speaking to each other. And this capacity is needed now more than ever in the climate sciences, as scientific institutions and agencies must continue to work together even when political relationships sour.

The missed opportunity of the movie Pressure to give Flavin Sweeney her due recognition makes the need to commemorate her in another way, feel more urgent. Personally, I don’t think a Dublin street name is the right way to do it as she did not have a connection to the city; it would be better if it were a STEM structure in her beloved Mayo. Knock Airport, perhaps?

Darach will be back next Sunday with more thoughts on the words and Irish cultural phenomena that unite us.