Indo Show Greystones Some Love

Indo 19AUG17

iven that we’re something of a role model for Irish towns on the up and up – and the fact that we’re so dang close to all those media heads in de capital – Greystones gets more than its fair share of love and attention from the mainstream media…

And today’s Indo is a good case in point, writer John Meagher waxing lyrical about our bustling little outpost, and getting the lowdown from the likes of the Flynnstones, Ruth Fitzmaurice and – yowsa! – even your soaraway Guide.

The headline to the main piece is quite telling – Welcome To Pleasantville, it quips, a reference to the 1998 film about the fictional American town where everything is just peachy and clean, and innocent, 24 hours a day, and it’s all in reassuring old black’n’white.

With no grey areas. Or grey matter, for that matter.

Our personal favourite headline though is the panel piece with author Ruth Fitzmaurice, who has just released her acclaimed memoir, I Found My Tribe. That headline reads…

I Used To Go To Bray To See Interesting People

Sure, didn’t we all…?

For town shaman Siobhan Hanley, it’s the arrival of The Happy Pear that changed Greystones. “Before they came,” she states in the piece, “it was a sleepy Protestant town. Now, it’s a real foodie place. There are restaurants everywhere.”

I tell ya, she’s not wrong. On every count. Not that the Flynn’s empire is the only show in town. Another cafe owner in the town – who, hey, decided to remain nameless – wanted to point out to the Indo that Greystones’ foodie reputation today rests on the wider restaurant community. “I don’t think there’s enough made of that in the media,” he says. “It’s all Happy Pear this, Happy Pear that.

“Make sure you tell your readers that there are places in Greystones where you can order meat!”

Ah, that great Greystones wit. Mixed with a little of that great Greystones resentment.

Elsewhere, a woman with a yoga mat tucked under her arm – hey, I think I know her! – addresses the great divide between Greystones and our big brother neighbour, Bray. “They don’t like us because we’re posh,” she smiles, “and we joke that we don’t like them because they’re not.” The real difference, reckons our friend, is “Bray feels like a big, impersonal town and Greystones still feels like a village“.

When it came to your super-witty and super-articulate GG, we reckon young Meagher may want to have his ears checked, as we allegedly waxed lyrical during our chat about the grand old houses in ‘The Bunbury’.

Still, as we’ve often said here, Greystones is a town very much on the up, as reflected in the likes of the 16-acre park down at the North Beach due in 2019, and – thanks to young Ross McParland – the town finally getting a top-of-the-range, cream-of-the-crop, top-of-the-pops theatre in the shape of The Whale.

Meagher is quick to point out that, yep, it’s nuts that we don’t have a hotel in such a tourist paradise – especially with that daily flow of happy trekkers emerging from our the El Cliffo Walk.

We’ll give the last word to that eejit, Stephen Flynn.

“People that live here know that it has so much going for it, but you can’t get complacent. You have to keep asking yourself, ‘what can I do to make this a better place?’.”