It used to be said that Spaniards sent their offspring to learn English in Ireland because we are a Catholic country. The unspoken implication was that their daughters would return with their virginity intact, a state of affairs which could not be guaranteed if they were exposed to the loose Protestant morals of England.

That all sounds very naive today but the director of the Cork-based Language & Activity Holidays, Valery Cullen says that the perception of Ireland as a Catholic country still matters to the Spanish and Latin Americans. They place great emphasis on family values and in Ireland the vast majority of foreign students stay in homes. In England they can stay in guest houses or even council housing.

There is a practical side to this in terms of their learning. In an Irish home, the students must speak English perforce. In an English guesthouse, which may sleep eight to 10 people of the same nationality, the unconfident or the lazy can talk among themselves and use English only in the classroom.

About 60 specialist tour operators assembled in the Grand Hotel, Malahide, Co Dublin, last month for a workshop on English language training in Ireland. They came from most of the countries of western Europe, from Sweden to Greece, former Eastern Bloc countries such as Russia, Croatia, Slovenia, Latvia and the Czech Republic. The point of the exercise was to show them the Irish product in the flesh.

"Anyone can run off a glossy brochure saying we do this and that - but they don't," says Ernie Crossen, who has run the Dublin School of English since 1968. It was important, therefore, for the tour operators to see for themselves what Ireland offers. Some of the operators were coming from a similar workshop in Brighton, where the British product was on display.

Crossen has just returned from yet another workshop, this one in Honolulu, showing the international scope of the business. He says we - and Britain - are competing in the Pacific Rim against Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

Surprising as it may seem to us, these countries have persuaded some Japanese and South Korean operators that they speak a "better" English than the English spoken in England. But again there is a practical dimension - it's a good deal cheaper to get from Osaka to Sydney than from Osaka to Dublin.

Mary Towers, chairperson of Marketing English in Ireland, a marketing co-operative set up by most of the Irish schools, points to the challenge Ireland faces because of the cost and availability of air travel to this country.

About 70,000 teenage students, principally from continental Europe, spent the summer of 1997 learning English in Ireland. They are highly visible, but the 30,000 mature students also coming to Ireland to learn the language are valuable because they help spread the business through the year; the student element is of its nature concentrated during the summer holidays.

The Irish schools are also targeting countries in Latin America whose summer holidays take place during our winter.

The schools have their own association, the Recognised English Language Schools Association. This is recognised by the Department of Education, which also inspects the schools.

The Malahide operation was the biggest single promotion of Ireland as a venue for professional language training. The organisers say it was designed to consolidate Ireland's position as one of the most popular countries for this form of business tourism - and to defend the country's market position against increasing competition from Britain, the United States and Australia, where schools have been targeting many of Ireland's traditional markets.