The first time I visited Newgrange, parking was beside the burial mound. Admission was 50p, payable at the tiny hut. Then it was up the hill and into the passage grave to be greeted by a helpful guide who understood the magic of the place. Amid the peace and solitude of the expansive Meath countryside it was easy to feel in touch with our stone-age origins, writes John G O'Dwyer.
Now, I suspect you've already got one wrong impression. You see, I don't have a bus pass and my first sighting of Newgrange didn't coincide with the economic war. In fact, it was just 20 years ago, but that was before mass tourism invaded the Boyne valley.
Nowadays, things are vastly different. On arrival at Newgrange you are directed to the Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre. This is indeed an impressive edifice, but in terms of closeness to the burial mounds you might as well be in Cavan. It is, however, a good place to appreciate that day-trippers have the swarming instincts of bees. Each year 220,000 come to this Centre but only 45,000 get to make the onward bus journey to the burial mounds at Newgrange and Knowth.
Now coming from a rural background and with a professed liking for hill-walking and the solitude it brings, it isn't surprising, perhaps, that these days I avoid the queues at Newgrange and go instead to nearby Loughcrew. Here you can still park close to the burial mound and clamber up the hill to the burial chamber under your own steam. There remains a dreamy solitude about the place and, while the passage grave is not aligned to the winter solstice as is Newgrange's, sunlight floods the chamber for the spring and autumn equinox. It requires just a small step of the imagination and stone-age farmers are in the plain below celebrating the vernal dawning with druidic rituals.
On my last visit, however, I took to wondering how much longer such solitary imaginings will be possible. Last year, a high powered Tourism Policy Group gave us a tantalising glimpse of the promised land for tourism - an increase in visitor numbers from just over 6 million to 10 million by 2012. In other words, the number of tourists coming to Ireland will be almost 2.4 times the national population. Fascinated by such phenomenal predictions I looked up visitor numbers for other countries. The UK (population 58 million) currently attracts about 24 million international visitors while the 51 million visitors going to highly touristic Spain exceed the national population by only about one-third. Indeed, if we exclude tiny nations such as Malta, only one major European country (Austria) presently exceeds a 2:1 visitor/population ratio.
In 2003, despite some gloomy predictions, Irish tourism turned in a record performance, attracting 6.37 million overseas visitors. Certainly, we should give ourselves a collective pat on the back for increasing visitors numbers in difficult times, but shouldn't we also consider what will happen if we end up with five international visitors for every two locals? What footprints will 10 million pairs of feet leave on Irish communities?
Of course there will be a welcome increase in spending, jobs and business opportunities, but without effective planning there will surely be environmental damage, overcrowding and unsightly development. Indeed, some commentators regard mass tourism as undesirable in itself, seeing it as eroding of local cultures, trivialising culture and historic sites and spawning drug, prostitution and crime problems.
Perhaps we shouldn't worry too much about the last three, given the dominant age profile of the visitors we see, but we cannot deny that authentic locations are necessarily changed and trivialised to accommodate tourism. It now seems almost inevitable that the timeless seaboard villages of our youthful memories fall victim to their own popularity - swallowed up within a concrete jungle. Is this already happening at Baltimore, Ballyvaughan and Ardmore? Maybe not just yet, but certainly Dublin Airport, Temple Bar and Muckross House, Killarney are uncomfortably crowded in high season. Drive round the Ring of Kerry on a summer morning and you will likely get stuck behind a convoy of coaches. Will this convoy double in the future?
A second terminal is the obvious solution for capacity problems at Dublin Airport, but what if our historic sites are unable to cope? Since we cannot recreate Newgrange, should Loughcrew be developed to accommodate the over-spill and will its uniqueness be lost in these circumstances? Does tourism ultimately devour the very qualities which caused it to spring forth in the first place?
Now don't misunderstand me: we should certainly be trying to attract more visitors to Ireland, but if the Tourism Policy Group is correct, major decisions lie ahead. We didn't exactly cover ourselves in glory by failing to plan for the boom of the 1990s and our quality of life is much the worst for this omission. We cannot afford to fail again. Perhaps what we now need is the self-confidence to stop believing that all tourism is good and begin planning instead for the level and kind of tourism that will be sustainable and complementary to our culture and environment.