You Will have seen the reports that another £100 million is to be spent next year on promoting this State as a tourist destination. The current year is the ninth in which the State has successively increased tourist numbers.
Once again, Bord Failte will concentrate in the coming year on attracting high-spending tourists from selected countries. Well-heeled individuals, couples, groups, coach parties, anglers, walkers, golfers and students of English will all be eagerly welcomed. Meanwhile, backpackers, students, hitchhikers, artists, hippies, New Age travellers, naturists, refugees, low-maintenance vegans, eco-warriors, the unemployed and other foreign riff-raff will not actually be turned away, but will be pretty actively discouraged.
Advertising campaigns are planned for all the usual places, including the US and the UK, but four countries - Belgium, Spain, Austria and Switzerland - will be dropped from the list.
Not everyone understands how these decisions are made by Bord Failte and the Tourist Marketing Partnership, but as a regular consultant to the industry, with access to the recent strategy meetings, I have a fairly good insight.
Why, you might ask, are we no longer bothering with the four countries named above, since presumably there are plenty of well-off people living there? Well, regarding Austria and Switzerland, it boils down to the fact that while we want high-spending tourists, we really can't be bothered with picky people. The Austrians and the Swiss are so fastidious, ultra-sophisticated and impossibly wealthy that Ireland, despite its commercial success in recent years, offers little to attract them.
It is well known too that these people drink very little (there is more froth than beer in an Austrian stein) and go to bed early, especially on holidays, which they regard as annual opportunities for learning and self-improvement instead of for wild indulgence, the way normal people do. These jaggedly sophisticated people abhor the notion of "craic": they do not appreciate the down-home friendliness and the backslapping fervour we Irish are famed for. Furthermore, Austria and Switzerland also have more mountains and lakes than we could dream of, all of them vastly superior to ours in terms of size, cleanliness and accessibility. Neither have we ever produced a proper sucher tarte or anything approaching the geometric perfection of Toblerone.
We have not quite given up on Austria and Switzerland. Having toyed with the rather hopeless idea of promoting Ireland as a centre of horology, skiing, temperance, punctuality and the far Right, we finally agreed to simply commission a report on how we might market xenophobia as an Irish tradition shared with a few select countries.
Spain was discussed for quite a while. The obvious question was - do we really want more Spanish people here? The less obvious question was - where are they? It was pointed out that while Spanish students spread like a virus through the land every summer, no one had ever seen any of their parents, or indeed any Spaniard over the age of 21. Nor had any of us who holidayed in Spain ever seen any Spanish adults near a beach, a hotel or a nightclub. We concluded that there was little point in advertising to a market which appeared to be non-existent.
As for Belgium, we considered it far too small and inconsequential to bother with. The usual jokes were made. Beer and surrealism were mentioned. So was Hercule Poirot. That took all of a minute. We finally decided to work on a long-term strategy relating Belgian's colonial history to our own (as a colony), and perhaps drawing some visitors from the Congo (as it used to be). It can't do any harm, surely.
Finally we had to contend with the worrying revelation that while "people, pace and place" are still the core attractions of an Irish holiday experience for visitors from overseas, the key appeal of "pace" is under threat from the booming economy. Of course we all saw the irony here. The whole country is torn between embracing the booming, go-ahead, fast-paced rush to prosperity, while at the same time our overseas tourists still expect to see a pace of life more consistent with an ass and cart travelling along a bog road.
We agreed to go away and think about it. Some of us are going away to the Canaries, others to the Rocky Mountains and the usual crowd to Gstaad, after Christmas, when the pace eases up a bit.
bglacken@irish-times.ie