A new fáilte from rip-off Ireland

COMMENT

WHILE visiting friends in Dublin a few weeks ago, they put to us an interesting proposition. Seeing as we no longer live in Ireland and Helen is not from there in the first place, why not take a trip into the capital and visit a tourist attraction?

I was intrigued by the prospect of being a tourist for the day and entered the thing in full spirit. We were in Ireland, so of course we high tailed it to a famous brewery and, after getting over our initial shock, paid the exorbitant asking price to take a tour. We began by watching a film about the history of the world famous brand in question, which was laughable even if it was later revealed to have been made by a student of advertising in their first term in college. The guide made no efforts to hide her attitude towards the tripe and mocked it openly. With robotically repetitious inflection, she urged us to follow her on the rest of the tour. As she whizzed us through the motions, we had barely a moment to consider what we were seeing and ended up almost as well informed at the end of the experience as we were at the beginning. I say nearly because I genuinely wondered if the level of dumbing down during the tour had in fact stolen from me mentally.
At the end of the experience, one of our party lodged a complaint with the front desk regarding the cost/experience ratio and also the uninterested attitude of the guide. The complaint was received with all the pleasure of a medical test result and they were given an email address to send their thoughts to if they still felt the need when they got home.
With this experience still fresh in my mind, I read the various press releases and news reports over the course of last weekend regarding tourism in Ireland. The latest figures released by the Central Statistics Office regarding visitors to the country are staggering. They clearly back up what many people have been saying for a long time now; that Ireland has priced itself out of the market. I have been whingeing like a skinflint in these pages for a long time that visiting home is a savagely expensive exercise. Listening to the radio while we were back on the last occasion revealed that people in Ireland have also stopped holidaying at home. They have done this not because there is a shortage of beautiful places to visit, it is simply not affordable anymore.
The Irish Examiner reveled that “641,400 fewer visitors came to Ireland in the first five months of 2010 compared to last year”. This incredible figure breaks down to 4,250 a day. In anyone’s language, that is incredible. The paper further outlined: “The biggest fall-off in visitors was from Britain (30%), followed by other parts of Europe (19.8%) and North America (16.7%).”
Given the strength of sterling and the dollar when compared to the euro, added to the fact that Ireland is so ludicrously expensive, easily what has caused this drop-off in visitors. Personally, however, I think there is a deeper issue. That issue is the wholesale slaughter of the goose that has for many years laid a golden egg for Ireland; the tourism industry. For far too long, visitors to the country have been treated like rotating kebab meat in a take away whilst the Irish tourist industry comes and helps themselves to as much of the meat as they wish to harvest before casting what remains on a plane back to wherever they came from.
For many years, it was a staple of Irish comedy to tell victorious tales of how we had deployed our cute-whoreism to defraud “The Yanks”. The money flowed into our stricken economy of the time and we laughed all the way to the bank. Killarney in particular seems to have grown extra bloated on this practice and has long been known to Irish people as a place to avoid without a gold-plated credit card.
Things have changed radically in recent years, however, and the image of the poor Irish simply getting one over on their economic betters has altered into the greedy Irish simply robbing people.
A letter in Monday’s Irish Times from Eamonn O’Loghlin the editor/publisher of Irish Connections Canada in Ontario, revealed an altogether new tourist experience for a group of young people from Canada. “On their last night after a farewell banquet, nine of these kids (16 and 17-year-olds) were accosted in the middle of Grafton Street at just after 10pm by four drug-induced punks who threatened to knife them if they didn’t buy drugs from them. Luckily they ran and got away from these gurriers who shouted anti-American profanities at them.”
Not the kind of experience Bord Fáilte put in their brochures on a regular basis but I’m sure a memory that will live with those kids for many a year. They were not wandering aimlessly around estates forgotten or ignored during the years of the Celtic Tiger, they were on one of the most famous shopping streets in the country. It now appears that the Leprechaun of Irish legend is as likely to beat you with his Shillelagh or threaten your life with a more dangerous weapon as he is to lead you to a pot of gold.
Most people I meet in Scotland who hear the accent say they would either love to go to Ireland or have been in the past and had a great experience but all tend to add the phrase “Bloody expensive” at the end of their speech. In all honesty, I am at a loss as to possible ways to address these problems. Ireland is a very expensive place to visit. Perhaps it is time for the tourism industry to accept that maybe it’s not numbers that matter anymore. It must now focus on attracting those who can afford to be ripped off. But what a shameful situation.