Donal Hickey: April a capricious month as we move from showers to flowers

People in medieval times depended on weather lore for their forecasts with many people in rural Ireland still mindful of the old proverbs

April weather can be mixed, with everything from sunshine to buckets of rain and gusty conditions.

There’s a lot of obvious truth in the old proverb about April showers bringing forth May flowers. As we’ve just seen, April can be a capricious month with very mixed weather - sunshine, frost, cold, hail, buckets of rain and gusty conditions.

Dating from medieval times when people depended on weather lore for their forecasts, the proverb has long been embedded in the national psyche.