The winds of change for our traditional seasons?

On Monday night’s Nine O’Clock News, on RTÉ 1, weather presenter Gerry Murphy announced that "In Ireland, autumn is September, October and November". As bald and as bold as that.

The Irish Met Office has a web-page, ‘Fun Facts for Young Primary Students’, which says “Spring begins on the first of March and continues until the end of May”.

This is not true.

In Ireland, as Dinneen says in his dictionary, “Earrach, the spring, begins on Lá Fhéile Bhríde, February 1st, and ends on the day before Lá Bealtaine, May 1st”.

This, our inheritance, is a beautiful division of the year, with ceremonies attached to the opening days of each season, and each season balanced around a significant centre: Spring equinox, mid-summer, autumn equinox and mid-winter.

The state meteorological office has no business changing a part of our culture, a part that connects the people of Ireland, through an unbroken folk tradition, with their Gaelic, pre-Norman past.

We must not let this go. We were taught the months of the Irish seasons in school, and I taught them to successive generations of schoolchildren. It is Myles na gCopaleenish for a semi-state office to change the Gaelic culture by proclamation. The Met Office should apologise for their little campaign, and end it.

But if they succeed, in another 20 years a thousand year-old cultural tradition may be lost.

Official Ireland should be preserving our way of relating to the year, not just because it is a tradition, but because it is human-centred, and connects us, if only in a faint way, to the cosmos.

The Met Office can say what they like to the British Met Office, but they cannot say what they like to the people, young or old, of Ireland.

Michael Brennan

Oakley Lawn

Earls Court

Waterford