God save Ireland from the hanging basket brigade. What started out 30 years ago as an attempt to brighten up Clonakilty in west Cork has become a plague of trumpet- like petunia all across the country.

Let’s call it Clonakilty Disease. Kenmare in Co Kerry seems to have been the second town to succumb to it, followed in quick succession by Skibbereen and Kinsale – or was it the other way around?

In any case, the vulgar floral virus is now all over the place and everywhere – especially as evidence of its grip on a town or village seems to be a key criterion for success in the Tidy Towns competition.

Last year’s overall winner – Moynalty, Co Meath – has lots of hanging baskets and window boxes on its brightly painted buildings, and this may help to account for the village pipping Killarney by a point.

Nobody could deny that the competition has promoted great community spirit among the hundreds of contestants since it was launched by Bord Fáilte in 1958. But this must not be misdirected.

For many years, Tynan’s Bridge House bar in Kilkenny stood out as you crossed the River Nore on John’s Bridge, the finely lettered fascia clearly visible. Now it’s completely covered by summer flowers.

Thicket of lobelia

Perhaps this peculiar form of Irish obscurantism may help to explain the profusion of projecting signs, particularly noticeable in Kenmare, as shopkeepers strive to get noticed above all the floral displays.

By far the most photographed example of the phenomenon is the Temple Bar Pub, in what one district court judge recently described, (without a shred of evidence) as Dublin’s “designated party zone”.

The facade of the pub notorious for charging €7.45 for a pint of lager is now a horticultural riot cluttered by hanging baskets, window boxes, “heritage-style” lamps and projecting signs – some unauthorised.

You could search long and hard through the National Library’s Lawrence Collection of photographs of Irish towns in the 19th century and find not a single example of a hanging basket anywhere.

Window boxes, yes, but no hanging baskets and certainly not a single shopfront fascia obscured. Aspidistra in decorative flower pot, framed by artfully draped net curtains, was the height of Victorian aspirations.

Bath’s floral regime

Every lamp post in this quintessential Georgian resort town is festooned with hanging baskets. They even have a municipal tanker trundling around the streets with a hose to supply them with water.

But Bath is in the southwest of England, an area renowned for its quaint villages and pretty, stone-fronted houses. This is hanging basket territory par excellence, along with scones and Devon clotted cream.

Ireland is not the English West Country and shouldn’t be made to look like it. We should stick with what we do best – painting buildings in different colours to create an overall composition of vibrancy in a town.

And there’s the nub. In far too many cases, the upper floors of buildings in Irish towns are vacant. Very few shopkeepers live above the shop any more, preferring bungalows in the countryside instead.

So, in a way, the flowers that bedeck these buildings now are a substitute for habitation and could even be read as wreaths in memory of a time when towns were actually lived in, rather than preyed upon.

Certainly, there are few sadder sights in Ireland than the inevitable abandoned building in the middle of a town or village – even if it has been cleverly concealed by painted boards in place of the windows.

Irish towns and villages need to be living places, not ersatz throwbacks to a time that never existed. Hanging baskets are merely tartification in the absence of any commitment to repopulate these places.

Frank McDonald is Environment Editor