Israel's foremost authority on Jerusalem's Western Wall visited Dublin this week to persuade more Irish people to visit the Holy Land.
After a short lecture tour of Britain, Dr Dan Bahat was in Ireland as part of a tourism drive to highlight Israel's second millennium celebrations.
While acknowledging the commercial benefits of the celebrations he feels they are secondary to seeing and understanding the new archaeological discoveries that have been made.
"The work in Jerusalem is of universal value, it's not just because I'm a Jewish archaeologist," he said.
Dr Bahat believes that it is important for pilgrims to leave Israel wishing to return again and is surprised that for such a Catholic country, Ireland has comparatively few pilgrimages to the Holy Land.
Dr Bahat is known internationally for his work at Jerusalem's Western Wall.
In 1987, he re-excavated the Hasmonean tunnel, the first time it had been entered in more than 100 years, and connected it to the Western Wall tunnel.
The tunnel was at the centre of Israeli-Palestinian conflict last year as the Muslim mosque is situated directly over the place where Jews believe the Holy of Holies is located.
Because the area is a holy site he believes that Muslims and Jewish Rabbi's will object to any digging. So he performs what he calls "physicians' work" using ultra sound and scanning equipment. "I can now indicate with great precision, places where events took place in the Bible. By having this access along the Western Wall we are now able to learn what happened on the Temple Mount."