Matt McNulty is charged with the following task: to ensure 16 planes carrying an extra 100 tourists each arrives in Ireland every day next year. That's in addition to the projected growth in tourism this year.

For the director-general of Bord Failte, it represents no mean challenge. The German market was down 25 per cent this year as economic growth remained sluggish and the strength of the pound against the deutschmark deterred tourists. The Asian economies are also suffering.

This means popular destinations, such as France and Germany will be competing harder to lure tourists to their countries to make up for the inevitable drop in business from Asia.

Mr McNulty and the Bord Failte staff will have to live up to this year's figures: a 7 per cent increase in visitors and a 9 per cent increase in revenue, compared to last year. "It will be the tenth successive year that we were on or ahead of target," he says.

Statistics roll off Mr McNulty's lips with ease: "We will break the five million visitors mark for the first time and £2.5 billion in revenue, for the first time," he says.

Around 8,000 new jobs will be created in tourism this year. Ireland is on target to employ 130,000 working in the industry at the end of 1999.

He says it all means that Ireland is 1 per cent ahead of the exacting targets set in 1988, a target which has two more years to run.

In plain terms it will translate into a tripling of the tourism numbers since 1988. That was the year the grand plan began. It had been decided one year earlier, in the words of the then Bord Failte chief executive and chairman Mr Martin Dully, that the Irish tourism product was "jaded" and was not up to international marketability standards.

In 1988, Mr McNulty was on loan from Bord Failte to the Dublin Millennium project. He recalls that towards the end of 1987, as work was underway for the Millennium, there was an awakening of people to the potential tourism could offer. "Everybody was getting kind of annoyed because we felt we weren't reaching our potential, the Government wasn't doing enough, we weren't doing enough ourselves," he says.

"When we drew up the first plan for tourism, which was launched in 1989, a better attitude was prevailing, but there was still some scepticism as to whether the investment would be forthcoming from the private sector."

The investment did come on stream. The task was to get the numbers and the marketing up, he says, because there was a high seasonality factor in tourism. This was also achieved and tourism built up its own momentum, he says.

Mr McNulty has worked in Bord Failte for nearly 30 years. It may come as no surprise that he seems entirely at ease with his brief, but he retains an interest, bordering on avid enthusiasm, in the job.

His first task was to bring in international conferences to Ireland. It was 1967. Dublin did not get many international events at that time but was beginning to realise their value.

"We built that up to a stage, fairly quickly, where we were getting around 150 conferences a year - in the legal, medical business and professional areas."

Experts forecast that with new technology, video conferencing and so forth, conferences might decline. This has not been the case, according to Mr McNulty.

"The human contact element is very important."

He says Ireland continues to do well in attracting events, despite the absence of a purpose-built national conference centre. He hopes the Government will be in a position to agree a candidate to build it by the end of March.

The conference centre project has had a chequered history to date, to say the least. There have been fears that Ireland will not qualify for EU funding because of the delays. Mr McNulty says this is not so and expects it to be built fairly shortly.

He favours a location within easy range of hotel accommodation and a good transport link. Dublin city centre or Ballsbridge would be ideal, he says.

Mr McNulty is keen to get a convention centre, for its contribution to Dublin city's economy. "It very much helps to underpin hotel developments in the city and turn parttime jobs into full-time ones."

Much of the development is tax driven and Mr McNulty says the growth in tourism will continue if the current tax conditions are retained. What the Government does in terms of giving out signals is important. At that moment it is giving out the right, confident signals, he says.

He doesn't believe the boom in tourism or international travel as he sometimes terms it, will end. He believes people always want to travel. But, he says the business will vary between different tourism products and market segments. "What we have to do is to position ourselves correctly in the different markets."

Asked what his job is, Mr McNulty smiles: "My job is to make it all happen." Making it all happen, is an onerous enough task. McNulty works a 12-14 hour day and is normally at his desk by 8.30 a.m.

He makes a point of visiting the regional offices in Ireland and abroad. Bord Failte has offices in 20 countries. He has just returned from Australia where he spent almost three weeks. Ireland plays host to around 3,5005,000 travel agents every year.

He took over the director-general post in 1993, having previously served as deputy director-general. His contract expires in April. A realist, he says his is not a job you could do forever. But, he was there at the start of what became a 12-year programme for tourism. And now he'd like to see it through.