Italian-speaking guide Micheal Tierney on the trials of touring Ireland with a coach-load of continentals and the hilarity caused by using a wrong noun gender
Next time you drive down Nassau Street in Dublin or go past Kilkenny Castle and see a horde of coach-tour buses parked together, spare a thought for the poor afflicted tour-guide on the bus. He or she will be the one with the microphone in one hand and the mobile phone in the other, who from April to October covers the tourist trails of Ireland with 44 or so tourists in tow. Like the campaigning politician, the tour-guide presses the flesh with hotel managers and cafe-owners from Westport to Waterford, and in the process takes the pulse of the nation.
Officially, the daily role of an Italian-speaking guide like myself on a five- or seven-day tour of Ireland involves shepherding the followers onto buses, around tourist sites and back into hotels, providing lectures about Irish history, politics and geography. (This part can sometimes be a bit dispiriting. My favourite example of my own bad pedagogical skills was when a man from Rome pointed at the ocean from the Cliffs of Moher and said; "Micheal, questo è il Mediterraneo?" Is this the Mediterranean? No, my friend, despite today's soft wind and blue sky, I'm afraid it is most certainly not the Mediterranean)
Unofficially, the job expands into the realms of the absurd. Just last week, I became embroiled in a heated discussion with a young Italian couple with whom I had become friendly (big mistake) about whether they should get married or not upon their return to Italy. People tend to use holidays as a time to take stock of their lives and the tour-guide is at hand as an unpaid guru. In the end I was invited to the wedding next spring.
Yet something makes guides return, season after season. Maybe it's the road-movie quality of it all - Dingle one day, a castle in Sligo with a four-poster bed the next. More probably it's the constant therapeutic support and light-relief provided by the guide's only real friend: the bus-driver. Bus drivers can pull you out of difficulty when a castle appears around a corner you know nothing about. The usefulness of gaeilge comes to the fore as the driver tells you in Irish this is a 14th-century Norman castle and you calmly pass on the information in Italian. Bus drivers know where to get a free lunch, usually have a great nose for trouble-makers on a tour and warn you in advance. They all know each other and have introduced me to a new world of tourist-industry gossip - which hotel is doing well, who has made the millions where, who is suing who. Céad Míle Fáilte - it's a dog-eat-dog world out there.
One advantage to working with Italians is that they are just as interested in comedy and theatrics as they are in dates and facts. A speech I was giving on the bus about Cromwell and "To Hell or To Connaught" was interrupted outside Ballinasloe by an impresario who grabbed the mike and started to sing O Sole Mio. My mistakes in Italian grammar, usually getting the gender of the noun wrong and thereby using a completely inappropriate word, are greeted with hilarity. In the Burren, when we passed a thatched cottage, I mixed up the masculine and feminine words for roof using tetta (meaning teat or tit) instead of tetto (roof). Ouch!
Italians love the simple things. They often gasp in pleasure on arrival at the airport, saying "che paradiso" (what a paradise), in response to the cool fresh air that contrasts with the furnaces of Milan and Bologna in August. They love our Atlantic coastline, wild fuschia, coloured houses and the tea and brown bread.
Urban Ireland seems, however, to have a less dazzling effect on outsiders. While staying in a new hotel in the suburbs of Galway, a group of my charges went for a walk after an evening meal. When they returned they talked about "una desolazione totale". When I asked for an explanation they said all they could see in every direction were motorways, roundabouts and no evidence of public transport.
So some storm-clouds loom for the love-affair between Ireland and our continental neighbours. Aside from the cost of living, too many of our hotels seem to be hankering after the days of high-spending American leprechaun-loving tourists, a rare species these days, with less allowance made for European tastes. Ms Cora Collins of the Irish Coach Tourism Council estimates that coach tour business is down by about 30 per cent this year and that the decline is not confined to the American market.
As we make our way back to Dublin at the end of a tour, a gloom descends upon the coach as another holiday is about to end and the intimacy that develops between 40 strangers is about to be broken. Like a rock-star who has been the centre of everyone's attention for a week, the exhausted guide goes home to experience Post-Tour-Traumatic Syndrome, the existential void of no longer having anything to explain, no menus to translate and no marriage problems to sort out. The rain outside and the shortening evenings suggest autumn is closing in. James Joyce once said in one of his short stories that the three prerequisites for happiness were the company of continentals, the possession of money, and travelling at high velocity. Maybe next season, if I'm back on that bus again, I might agree.
