It has been a very wet and unsettled July, but we may have to wait a while for a change in the weather.

Alan O'Reilly from Carlow Weather told The Hard Shoulder we've had one of the wettest July's on record.

"Provisionally, it looks like probably the second-wettest July at Dublin Airport since records began in 1939," he said.

"The only thing is the wettest July was actually 2009, so it wasn't that long ago.

"It's the number of days of rainfall as well which has been the problem.

"We've had more than twice the monthly average in many areas, but there's also been rain [for] about 27 or 28 days at a lot of stations.

"It's been a very, very wet and doom and gloomy July unfortunately".

What's in store next month?

Mr O'Reilly said he expect things to get better, slowly, in August.

"Nature has a way of levelling things out... and averaging out most years, so hopefully that will happen," he said.

"There's still some more weather to come unfortunately.

"August is still summer, it's not autumn, so we still have another month of summer to come.

"We're going to see another low pressure system - this conveyor belt, a jet stream, is just rolling them off one after another.

"Another one coming tomorrow night, it's going to turn very wet again.

"That's going to move away on Wednesday, and then there's going to be a bit of an improvement for Wednesday afternoon and Thursday and Friday.

"When I say 'an improvement', I mean less rain with some sunny spells".

Weather map shows conditions for Friday. Picture via @metoffice on Twitter

Mr O'Reilly said the coming weekend is looking "very uncertain."

"The weather models were showing a very nasty storm developing, but thankfully they seem to have given up on that idea," he said.

"There is a risk of a low-pressure system coming close to us for the weekend, so we could still see some more rain.

"However... the weather models are starting to come into some better agreement that we will see a change around the middle of the month.

"It's a long way off in weather model terms... but around the 10th of August some of the weather models are showing high pressure.

"It might be brief, but it does show a bit of high pressure coming towards us," he added.

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Main image: A weather map shows unsettled conditions across Ireland. Picture via @metoffice on Twitter