Irish Summer Treats We Still Haven’t Recovered From
Words: Tobi Ilori
Photos: Luke Keating
Before beach-shop freezers were full of protein ice creams, mochi balls and chocolate-bar collabs, Irish summer meant HB posters, sticky hands and the panic of choosing an ice pop on a school tour.
Summer used to taste strangely specific.
Artificial strawberry. Cola ice. Freezer burn. Melted chocolate. The wooden stick flavour you only noticed when the good bit was gone. That unnatural orange that existed nowhere in fruit, but made complete sense after swimming lessons.
It lived in beach shops, caravan parks, Spar freezers, GAA club kiosks, school tours and the one shop near the beach with an HB poster so sun-bleached it looked like it had survived several governments.
Choosing was never casual. You stood there with wet hair, warm coins and about 40 seconds before your mam said, “Hurry up, we’re not here all day.” One wrong move and your cousin got something better. One right move and you felt like the richest child in the caravan park.
This is for the stranger, stickier summer ice creams that felt enormous at the time and then somehow slipped out of the national conversation. Some disappeared. Some came back. Some might still exist in pockets, rumours or foreign freezers.
All of them belong to the same little archive of Irish summer: HB posters, sticky hands, melted chocolate and frozen things that made far more sense when you were eight.
That-A-Way: The Ice Pop With Directions
That-A-Way was a strawberry HB ice lolly shaped like a pointing finger, which sounds made up until you see the old poster and suddenly remember every child in Ireland briefly becoming unbearable with it.
You bought one and immediately started pointing. At the shop. At your cousin. At the sea. At a dog that had done nothing to deserve it. The joke lasted about 30 seconds, because after that it was melting down your hand and you had to decide whether dignity or strawberry ice was more important.
It belonged to school tours, beach shops and that very specific childhood belief that an ice pop could also be a personality. It is not a current freezer-cabinet regular in the way the classics are, so the safest way to describe it is culturally gone rather than making a full legal declaration over a lolly.
Sparkles: The Box Your Mam Bought For Everyone
Sparkles were the freezer-drawer solution to having too many children in one garden.
They came in a box, in flavours like pineapple, pear, orange, cola, lemon and lime, and strawberry. Nobody was announcing to the room that they had secured a Sparkle. Nobody was strutting around with one like they’d won the Lotto. But if a box appeared from the freezer on a hot day, suddenly everyone was very available.
The cola and strawberry ones moved first. Obviously. Pear waited around like the cousin nobody wanted to play rounders with.
Sparkles feel less like a product people mourn loudly and more like a bit of Irish summer admin that quietly vanished. They were what happened when the weather reached 17 degrees and a parent needed to stop a crowd of cousins turning on each other before dinner. Not glamorous. Completely effective.
Tongue Twister: Before Twister Got Its Glow Up
Tangle Twister belongs to the older HB poster world. The sort of thing you remember in flashes: the colours, the shape, the freezer-door fog and the feeling that everything on the poster cost pence and somehow still required serious budgeting.
Modern Twister-style products still exist, so this one needs careful wording. We are not saying fruit-flavoured spirals have disappeared from the earth. The point is that the older Tangle Twister has mostly become poster archaeology, living in the heads of people who remember staring at an HB board like it was a menu in a Michelin restaurant.
It had just enough colour and movement to feel exciting, without asking you to commit to chocolate. A safe adventure. Very Irish childhood. You wanted novelty, but you did not want to stray too far from fruit-flavoured coldness and a stick.
Freaky Foot: A Frozen Foot, Because Apparently That Was Normal
There was a time when a child could walk into a beach shop, point at an ice cream shaped like an actual foot, and nobody involved would pause to ask if the child was okay.
Freaky Foot, and its Funny Feet cousin, sat in that strange category of freezer treats you accepted completely as a child. Pink ice cream. Vanilla. A chocolate-covered big toe. A sentence that sounds deranged now, but at the time barely registered. It was funny, a bit cursed, and exactly the kind of thing you wanted after a swim when your standards had been lowered by chlorine and hunger.
The real madness is how normal it felt. A foot-shaped dessert was just another option beside the Brunch and the Loop the Loop, and we all carried on as if that was a reasonable society.
This one is best framed as culturally gone. Whether people remember the exact branding or not, children today are not being asked to face foot-shaped dessert in the same character-building way.
Wibbly Wobbly Wonder: The One That Still Hurts
Wibbly Wobbly Wonder is probably too famous to be properly niche, but leaving it out would be cowardly.
Strawberry and banana ice cream. Lemon jelly. Chocolate coating. A name that sounded like a children’s TV presenter had been given too much freedom. On paper it should have been too much. In the hand, it made complete sense.
A Wibbly Wobbly Wonder felt like a full afternoon pretending to be an ice cream. It was colourful, structurally ambitious and deeply unserious, which is probably why people still talk about it like a national wound.
It was taken off the market in the late 1990s and made a brief return for HB’s 80th anniversary celebrations in 2006, which only added to the emotional damage. Nothing makes people remember a treat more intensely than bringing it back for a second and then taking it away again
Dracula: The One That Refuses To Stay Dead
Dracula is a slightly different case because it has returned to Irish shelves in recent years, including Tesco Ireland. That matters, because calling it fully gone would be asking for trouble from someone with a receipt and too much time.
Still, it belongs in this piece because Dracula carries the energy of the old freezer cabinet more than almost anything else.
Black cola-flavoured ice. Red fruit “blood” vibes. Vanilla inside. The whole thing felt like contraband for children who wanted a treat with a bit of danger attached. You ate it and your mouth became evidence. Your tongue looked like you had been involved in something you could not fully explain.
It may be back in some form, but culturally it still feels like it came from the haunted corner of the HB poster. A retro survivor with a flair for drama.
The great Irish summer treat was never really about quality.
It was about the moment. Wet hair. Warm coins. Sand in your shoes. A freezer door fogging up while six children panicked in front of a poster. The wrong choice could ruin your afternoon. The right choice could make you feel briefly untouchable.
Some of these are gone. Some are half-remembered. Some have returned in new forms. But they all belong to the same sticky little archive of Irish summer: artificial fruit, melting chocolate, HB posters and the pressure of picking before your mam changed her mind.
The big freezer in the sky is very full.
We still have questions.
