Nostalgia will always sell – particularly for those with a sweet tooth

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There’s an Irish guy about to make his fortune exporting Tayto to Australia at a time that Walker’s are looking to increase their share of the Irish market by having Gary Lineker front a campaign to come up with bizarre new flavours.

Proof, yet again, that we only really miss those goods that are quintessentially Irish when either they’re gone or we’re gone.

Eamon Eastwood isn’t stopping at Tayto either – TK red lemonade, Club orange, Barry’s tea and Batchelor’s beans are all on their way to over 600 stores Down Under, ensuring more than a little taste of home for our brightest and best on the other side of the world.

The only surprise is that this has only been done on a limited scale in the past, because we Irish have been exporting the weirdest things from home for as long as we’ve had air and sea travel.

There’s been many the highly trained drugs sniffing dog who has gone off his head at an airport carousel … only to discover that the drugs consignment just arriving in from Shannon was in fact a couple of pounds of Denny’s sausages wrapped up in tee-shirts.

There has never been an emigrant or middle-aged holidaymaker who left without a couple of boxes of Barry’s – as though Cork, as opposed to Ceylon, was the tea-growing capital of the world.

The Rebels, of course, have taken this sense of ownership to a higher level, with their own stouts – Murphy’s and Beamish – their own tea and their own newspaper, de Paper.

They swear by tripe and drisheen, two food products designed to turn the eater’s own innards by feeding him the stomach of a dead cow, pig or sheep.

They also love to wash that down with an oul’ can of Tanora, that sickly sweet tack that makes Coke seem like a health drink.

The manufacturers tried it on the rest of the world but only in Cork did it gain traction – although there were rumours that it was highly prized in border counties where they laundered it and resold it as dodgy diesel.

Elsewhere, there’s a Dublin dish called coddle which is essentially a stew with boiled sausages, but it looks like something that you fished out of the Liffey in a bucket.

And let’s not forget Waterford’s efforts to patent its blaa, as though the rest of us never had ready access to a thousand different varieties of potato dishes.

But we’re now talking about a whole new food tradition – the one that makes our ex-pats homesick for Tayto, a product that looked to have had its day but which now has its own theme park up in Ashbourne.

Not that the animals would appear too thrilled about life in the Tayto kingdom – inspectors from the National Parks and Wildlife Service recently found evidence of “inappropriate breeding” and “overweight” racoons, leading to a ban on the facility from adding animals to its zoo for the second year in a row.

Things, it must be said, are much better for the meerkats who had problems during a previous inspection – although they might need to watch out in case the current Walker’s campaign votes them in as the basis of a new flavour.

But whatever about the animals or the park itself, it’s the original product first dreamed up by Joe ‘Spud’ Murphy back in the 1950s – and like a taste of home, it only takes a glimpse of the famous red packet to make us all nostalgic for another time.

We remember them like Sherberts or penny bars, Curlywurlys or Highland Toffee, Wagon Wheels, gobstoppers, Blackjacks or Love Hearts – not necessarily because we love them but because they bring us back to the world of our youth.

Because they are part of what we are.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.