'Gone With The Rain' - how YPS stole Ireland from the Irish !

 

Sure, 'tis mighty the way we're hitting the headlines nationwide! 

Galway Galway Galway, that's the news these days. 

If it weren't for that microscopic parasite burrowing into our guts, there'd be rakes of tourists cluttering up the place, making it impossible to get things done. 

Now that they are staying away in their droves,

(and let's be honest, who can blame them? Who wants to be the Daddy that little six year-old Seany looks up to, as he agonisingly twists his tiny body in contortions of dry retching: "Daddy, Mummy says you huhuhukakakakfleeaaarrrgghhhhhh you you knew the water was bad in in in Gaaaaaaaaaaaalwweeeeeeeey, ga gaGalway. Did you know Daddy? Did you? Did you?" )

there is plenty of time to paint the entire city and county yellow. 

Yes folks, our old adversary Yellow Paint Syndrome is back with a bubonic vengeance. 

From what I understand, the 'crypto' bit of cryptosplitsoredabum means 'hidden' or 'obscure', and although little could be less obscure than the colour in which you paint your buildings, the insidious effect of diseases like YPS is that they remove elements of your country's culture that might never return. 

Even though I have spent 15 years going on and on about what I, as English Yiddish Atheist do and do not love about Ireland, I am as wary as the Irish about outsiders who tell you what your own culture is really like. 

So when I recall arriving in an Ireland where pink and blue farmhouses dotted the land, it might well come over a tad too Chocolatey Boxey, but there were and are whitewashed cottages with red, green or sometimes yellow trim. 

Now Ireland is yellow, and the only damage limitation left available is which shade of yellow. 

YPS has hit Salthill hard, and recently the Waterfront Bar was smothered with a yellow so disgusting that it sears the retinas off my eyes and sends me on my way

Hang on in there Lonergan's Atlantic Bar, and your neighbours Killoran's bar, which is immune to attacks of YPS because it's real and right and already yellow.

I am mourning the loss of part of traditional Irish culture which is not mine to mourn, but also as a bipolar freak I am a blue person inside a red person inside a nutter, and yellow is where everyone else lives. 

Yellow is a nice colour, (and this yellow of which we speak is pretty close to 'magnolia' - oh yeh baby I know you know it is) and 'nice' is a word that my schoolteachers told us meant nothing. 

Another word was always better, and yellow is that to me. 

A harmless, safe, anodyne and completely boring colour, unless natural, on primrose or sunflower or flag iris: anything, in fact, but an Irish wall. 

Maybe YPS, this need to homogeonise, is deep-rooted in colonial fear, from not wanting to stand out from the crowd, and maybe that is hogwash. I just wish it would stop. 

We do not know what we have lost to YPS. This might seem a strange bugbear, a somewhat neurotic bête noir, but YPS is a crypto-cultural disaster. 

Before we notice, in front of our eyes the changes to blandness continue apace, and pretty damn soon all we'll have is hundreds of Subway takeaways inside yellow buildings.