Colm O'Regan: 'The Unas of this world will never have a storm named after them'

The nice thing about storm names is that they get you thinking and looking things up

Well, I, for one, am happy for the Fionnualas. A great name taken for granted. And now it will be a storm sometime this winter.

Fionnuala was the eldest sister of the Children of Lir. The one who did all the emotional labour. C-of-L locations should see a boom after this. Lough Derravaragh in Westmeath, the Sea of Moyle between Ireland and Scotland and Inis Glora off the Mayo Coast. If there is a storm Fionnuala ,though, it’s best not to go looking for enchanted swans.

The storms have been named. Amy, Bram, Chandra, Dave, Eddie, Fionnuala, Gerard, Hannah, Isla, Janna, Kasia, Lilith, Marty, Nico, Oscar, Patrick, Ruby, Stevie, Tadhg, Violet, Wubbo. 

The nice thing about storm names is that they get you thinking and looking things up. Amassing information for some future table quiz. Chandra is the Hindu God of The Moon. He is supposed to have had an affair with a Hindu God called Tara. (Not that Tara. Our Tara is from an old Celtic word meaning hill), Wubbo is in honour of a Dutch astronaut- Wubbo Ockels. Wubbo means to wobble or to stray.

Apart from the officially Irish names, the whole list has a distinctly more Irish look this year on account of a number of names being More Irish Than The Irish Themselves.

The Roman Patrick is a familiar blow-in, but Gerard — Gerdo in Cork — feels native but it’s actually Norman. It means ‘brave spear’. Oscar is both Irish and Norse — the Norse is Spear of the Gods (wall to wall spears this year), the Irish version is Friend of Deer (which is definitely not a spear).

New names for the forthcoming storm season.

Marty is a name all over the western world but now its synonymous with Marty Whelan. What a week for the broadcaster. Launching CMAT’s album on a Friday, being a potential storm on a Sunday.

It’s a big week too for How To Spell Tadhg. The spelling of Tadhg has long been a bugbear of mine. (By the way, a bugbear is a type of hobgoblin or boogeyman, the evil kind not the dancer.

In medieval England, the bugbear was a creepy bear that lurked in woods and was to scare children. Now it just means ‘peeve’ which just goes to show we’ve little to be worrying about.)

The T-A-D-H-G may gain an unassailable lead over the T-A-D-G-H-es and T-A-D-H-G-H-es. A younger, less tolerant version of me used to rail against these other spellings I thought were wrong but now I’m more live and let live (or lvie and lte lvie). I like it when a name makes you remember some half-forgotten thing. Lilith. I first heard it on the sitcom Cheers. Lilith was Frasier’s wife.

The name Lilith was in Jewish folklore as the first wife of Adam, who disobeyed him, was banished from the Garden of Eden and became a she-demon. Which sounds like a lot more fun than being blamed for everything, being cast into the darkness and being the guinea pig for childbirth pain, like Eve was. I imagine Lilith mouthing “Girl Runnnn!!!” to Eve as soon as she was spare ribbed.

And amongst all the myths and legends and intra-God affairs, it’s nice to see Dave and Eddie arriving in quick succession. I hope they’re only orange warning ones. They seem too good-natured to be reds. Maybe they’ll arrive together, just doing a few moving jobs.

You’d have to feel for the Unas of this world. There will never be a storm named after them. There are no storm names Q, U, X, Y and Z. This is to keep it consistent with the US. Although with the way the transatlantic relationship is going these days, who knows? Maybe the storms Quentin, Ursula, Xavier, Yolanda, and Zach are on the way one day. If we’re having 26 storms though, we have bigger problems than names.