TOURISM: FRANK SHOVLINreviews Irish Tourism 1880-1980by Irene Furlong Irish Academic Press, 272pp, €29.95
IS THERE something inherently funny about holidays in Ireland? The buckets and spades; the soggy sandwiches; the rain; the cramped car. Irish writers seem to think so.
John McGahern goes some way to capturing this comedy in his depictions of summer trips to the seaside, and in the bizarre Shannon sex tourism of
The Pornographer. Myles na gCopaleen, late of this parish, was particularly brilliant in his depiction of Ireland's attempts to promote itself as a tourist destination.
Writing in
Kavanagh's Weeklyabout the big tourism idea for the 1950s, the ill-fated homecoming festival, or Tóstal, he was biting and prescient. Recalling a chat with "a prominent Irish industrialist" about just what a Tóstal is, he has his eye on how he might exploit the new venture for his own gain: "I began to sniff about to find who was putting this new one out on us, whether there was money in it, whether it might mean jobs for the eight daughters, or whether, itself, I could get a free ride to New York and back out of Pan-American." (Sound familiar?)
The most entertaining section in Irene Furlong's sometimes dull book relates to the promotion and execution of An Tóstal. Perhaps the most striking of the book's many terrific illustrations is a poster for the inaugural An Tóstal for April 1953. Yes, April. What sort of a sadist, you might wonder, thought to lure unfortunate visitors to the island in what Patrick Kavanagh liked to describe as "the monsoon season"?
Not surprisingly, despite the vigorous support of Seán Lemass and other key government figures, the festival was a flop and petered out by the end of the decade.
The Daily Mirrorcorrespondent had great fun at the opening ceremony, describing its rapid descent into chaos: "Just before the opening, 3,000 Dubliners gathered near O'Connell Bridge and started pelting each other with flowers. Then with flowers in pots.
Then with rocks and bottles. Shop windows were smashed. Cars were overturned and decorations were ripped down and smashed. Twelve people were arrested. Four went to hospital. That's what I call a real At Home." O'Connell Street wouldn't see the likes of it again till Love Ulster came to town.
Speaking of Ulster, one of the difficult tricks this book tries to pull off is to analyse how tourism impacted upon the entire island both before and after Partition. The fact that the publication is supported by Tourism Ireland, the body responsible for promoting the island of Ireland overseas as a tourist destination, makes such an approach inevitable.
Though the 26 counties are given greater coverage, the author does a good job at catching the interplay - and now co-operation - between North and South. Although the study ends in 1980, a short postscript comments on current developments and on the impact of peace on the island. While today tourists visit the murals and flashpoints of Belfast, inevitably tourism to Northern Ireland suffered during the years of the Troubles.
One of the more original attempts to boost visitor numbers during this period was the use of a dozen "personality girls" on Irish Sea ferries in collaboration with the Northern Ireland Tourist Board. The Northern Ireland Tourist Board annual report for 1973 describes these women: "Ulster girls, most of whom were graduates or university students, were specially chosen for personality - their intelligence and good looks spoke well for our young women in general." Myles na gCopaleen would do well to top that.
It struck me again and again as I read this book that there is much of Myles about the whole tourist enterprise. Nobody lampooned civil service speak better than he did and the long lists of boards, bills, acts, and enterprises that litter the history of Irish tourism are so wearying that they become comedic. What would Flann O'Brien's fictional policemen do with the 1909 Health Resorts and Watering Places Act? Or the 1931 Tourist Traffic Act? Or the Derelict Sites Act of 1960?
The trouble, and the chief difficulty with this book, is that if you can't extract some sort of comedy value from bureaucracy then you are likely to find some of the more complex detail tiresome. Of course, the historian and the student will be interested in the facts and figures of visitor numbers, tourism as a percentage of GNP, and membership of government boards, but does anyone need to know the names of the two typists in the Irish Tourist Board of 1946, or that Aughrim, Co Wicklow, scored 299 points out of 400 in the 2007 Tidy Towns contest?
That said, there is much to admire here too. Irish Tourism, with its glossy paper and many illustrations, is a beautifully produced book. The attractive cover, reproduced from a John Hinde postcard, will bring many readers back to their own holidays of the past. Though these sometimes garish postcards have subsequently become the stuff of parody, they retain an abiding beauty, a quality recognised and memorably put to use in recent years by the artist Seán Hillen in his Irelantis collage series and by TG4 in their Cártaí Poist programmes.
These are worrying times for Irish tourism. Now that our valiant attempt to turn Ireland into Southfork has come to an end, our boutique hotels and spa treatments will disappear like snow off the hills. For sanity's sake, let's hope we've stored up enough nostalgia to make do for a while with a bucket and spade and a brace of personality girls.
*Frank Shovlin is senior lecturer of Irish literature in English at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. He is the author of The Irish Literary Periodical 1923-1958(Oxford, 2003)