THE announcement that the world's greatest cycling race will start in Ireland next year coincides with a new series of commercials on French television vaunting the virtues of Ireland as a tourism destination. They end with an exhortation by a female voice with a soupcon of an Irish lilt to dial "3615 Ireland" on France Telecom's Minitel teletext service to find out more.
The final details of the three day start have yet to be negotiated. The race begins with a brief and largely ceremonial prologue. This year's will cover eight kilometres in the centre of the Norman city of Rouen, the home of the late five times winner, Jacques Anquetil.
But the event is sure to bring at least several thousand cycling fans from the main participating countries on the Continent - France, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain - to Ireland and focus a good deal of international media attention on it.
It is a curiously seductive occasion, winning over even the most sceptical.
When the 1994 tour organisers said it would grace the Channel Tunnel a few weeks before its opening to passenger traffic, the whingeing in southern England about the potential for disruption was almost deafening.
In the event, when the cyclists disembarked from the tunnel train and charged through the villages of Kent and Sussex, even the most Francophobic locals fell silent and the occasion turned into a Latin style fiesta.
The reason for starting abroad next year is that France will be host to the soccer World Cup.
This also explains the late starting date, July 11th, on the eve of the "Mondial 98" final, to ensure that the two events do not overlap for long.
The tour has never before started outside of the continental mainland. But it has begun 12 times outside France.
Officials said yesterday that the details were far from complete. They said the cyclists would probably leave Ireland by air at the end of their three days. The caravan of bicycles and accompanying vehicles will follow by sea to Brittany, where the tour will resume.
The first tour was in 1903 and the first to start abroad was in 1954 in Amsterdam. There have been three other starts in Holland, three in Germany, two in Belgium and one each in Luxembourg, Spain and Switzerland.