The chairman of The Gathering 2013 initiative has congratulated actor Gabriel Byrne for “starting a conversation” about the relationship between Irish people and people of Irish descent abroad. Tim O’Connor said The Gathering 2013 “would fail if it was just a professional tourist initiative”.
In his criticism last year Byrne described The Gathering as a “scam”, and said the Irish abroad were interested in a deeper relationship with Ireland rather than being used as part of a “shakedown”.
Speaking on the margins of the 75th Annual Irish Hotels Federation conference in Killarney, Mr O’Connell said Byrne’s comments were welcome in that they had started people thinking about what was the relationship between “the one who stayed in the home place” and the people who emigrated.
The Famine
He said the story of emigration was complex, as typified by Tom Murphy’s play Conversations on a Homecoming, and the point of The Gathering was to bring people, families and communities together who had been separated as far back as the Famine.
He mentioned the launch of a Friends of Kerry initiative in Tralee this month as an example of the start of a new relationship between the people of Kerry and the Kerry diaspora.
He said the surprise was really that the initiative had not happened sooner.
However, he also rejected the suggestion the country was only interested in the relationship with its diaspora since the economic collapse because there was money in it.
In the last 10 years ,“when Ireland first had money”, some €100 million had been spent on services for Irish communities in traditional areas like the UK and the US. He had personally overseen spending of about $1 million when serving as consul general in New York for the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Mr O’Connor mirrored comments by members of the hotels federation, who said they too wanted to develop more links with Irish communities abroad.
According to the federation, numbers of visits from US and Canada grew to 1.02 million in 2012, up from 990,000 in 2011.
North America accounted for 10.4 per cent of hotel business in Dublin, but only 4.2 per cent of business for hotels outside of Dublin.
Catalyst
The federations said significant opportunities existed to grow US visitor numbers, particularly to the regions, “with The Gathering acting as a catalyst for a better understanding of how Ireland can nurture real and meaningful relationships that go beyond tourism”.
