I see that Monday night's edition of EastEnders, during which the Fowler family visited Ireland, has led to a number of complaints to the BBC by Irish viewers. Bord Failte is also upset at what it sees as a negative portrayal of our much-vaunted Irish hospitality, and would have preferred an approach more like that of Songs of Praise, which is currently representing the West of Ireland in a favourable, even glowing, light.

I am not a fan of EastEnders - I have enough to do keeping up with Coronation Street (Fred and Maureen's wedded bliss will not last, that much is obvious) - but I watched the controversial episode and found it fairly harmless.

The complaints centred on the representation of Ireland - or the bit of it visited by the Fowlers - as being populated mostly by noisy sheep, braying donkeys, abusive drunks, argumentative farmers, plamas experts, surly young men, put-upon women, uncontrollable children, more drunks, and unhelpful hotel staff. Some of these people play more than one role. Everyone turns out to be closely related to everyone else, and probably to the sheep, and all have inferiority complexes, including the sheep.

This seems fair enough to me, perhaps because I know that part of Wicklow. Indeed I recognised most of the characters, and a number of the sheep. However, the donkey on whose back young Lucy was given a friendly ride was definitely not a local, and there are good grounds for complaint here because there are at least half a dozen talented and photogenic donkeys in the immediate area who could have done the job as well if not better. This issue has rightly caused some upset in the town, where screen opportunities for donkeys are sadly limited.

As for the local publican/ hotelier who feigned umbrage at his town being referred to by the visiting Fowlers as a village, some viewers apparently took this as an adverse comment on the infuriating ways of Irish people when asked for simple directions. Other viewers thought he was depicted as an idiot.

In fact, the scene drew attention to local pride among Irish communities. You only have to think of the recent county boundary row involving a Clare village, and the Mayo/Galway island "secession" debacle not too long ago. The distinction between a town and a village is not unimportant, nor is it just a question of size. Many Irish village communities would rightly be upset if their homeplace were described as a town, not least when it comes to the annual Tidy Towns competition, when category becomes all-important.

It seems that the scene which aroused most outrage amongst Irish viewers involved the Fowlers arriving at the local hotel and being told they had no booking: the hotelier claimed that, while he was expecting the "Towlers", he had no documentation for the Fowlers. The East End family, however, succeeded in getting their rooms by convincing him a mistake had been made, and refused to answer his perfectly logical question: "What will I do if the Towlers turn up?"

The hotelier was being quite reasonable. Anyone who has ever worked in the trade knows the cock-ups which regularly follow incorrect booking procedures. It was not at all unlikely the "Towlers" would turn up later in the evening and throw the hotel into turmoil, probably resulting in a number of staff workers having to vacate their rooms.

One has only to look back at the Corrections and Clarifications column in this newspaper as recently as last Tuesday to see how easily mistakes can be made with similar-sounding names and what trouble can result: The Irish Times was obliged to point out that a letter in Saturday's editions was written by Simon P Haden, "not Maden as stated".

Behind this simple clarification lay a tyranny of phone abuse and pompous letters directed at this newspaper from Madens up and down the country, all of them violently disassociating themselves from the quite reasonable remarks about "Ireland of the Welcomes" made by Mr Haden.

We got even worse abuse from a selection of Maddens, though one of our beleaguered phone operators got her own back by innocently confirming to one caller that his name was Madden with two Ds - "as in maddening".