We have systematically destroyed rural life but the country is full of plush holiday homes – no wonder it all seems so quiet in tourist towns
YOU HAVE to look at self-catering in the round, you know. In the neighbouring tourist town at six in the evening the pubs are empty, but the supermarkets are full. It is in the supermarkets that you find the women on holiday doing their family shop.
They are also getting in the drink for themselves and the other adults to enjoy in front of the lovely peat fire, for which they have bought the peat themselves.
The foreigners are in the supermarket as well. Lidl is widely held to have changed everything; the young surfers are in there buying their beer. But still Lidl is strangely empty; it is Supervalu that is thronged with Irish holidaymakers, the serious shoppers. You’d want to see these women loading up the cars. They are buying pizzas and oven chips and ice cream and hot chocolate and everything that those gastronomic Hitlers, children, demand as holiday treats.
Because then you don’t have to eat out. Even fish and chips are preternaturally expensive. In this corner of Ireland of the Welcomes they are charging €3.25 for a cup of hot chocolate with a single marshmallow attached. Prices are so high that lovely young mothers are given the nod by rebellious shop assistants, who tell them that the ice creams are much cheaper in the shop next door.
The Irish tourist industry, God bless it, was founded on foreigners with money. Foreigners whom you had no hope – or even particular desire – to see again. Its totemic drink, the Irish Coffee, was a preposterous luxury. Now the grownups are necking McCormicks Irish Country Cream once the driving for the day is over.
We are having a lovely time, and are glad that we came. A lot of what the tourism people say is true: the sea is crystal clear, the scenery beautiful, the beaches empty, the people friendly. The kids are in paradise. On the one day on which it rained without stopping they were brought climbing and bungee jumping at an indoor centre which was a model of efficiency and where they had a brilliant time.
However, Irish tourism has to be heading for a re-think, because everywhere there are signs of change. And the signs are chilling. A restaurant and bar in a pretty tourist village displays its menu, which carries the following announcement: “Minimum Order at night is €12.95 Per Person Seated. No Plate Sharing.” You’ve got to love the 95 cent there. What a neat declaration of caution those two sentences are. If you displayed them in America you would be sued. If you displayed them in France or Italy or Spain you would be burned at the stake. Our tourist industry seems to be shot through with a suspicion of strangers and a horror of being made a fool of. These are strange emotions to find in the hospitality business, and yet the visitor quickly picks them up himself. No wonder we prefer to stay in at night, in our rented holiday homes, now that the rents have dropped.
Irish tourism exists, obviously, on the shifting ground of normal Irish life. The fact that communal life has deteriorated so sharply in the past 20 years, while private fortunes have improved so dramatically, is a disaster for the tourist trade.
Even city people cannot ignore the fact that rural life in Ireland has been systematically destroyed, and that we are expected to cavort in a sort of theme park. The creameries are now car parks and the fishermen are conducting eco-cruises.
Only the GAA is doing well. Why go to the local pub if the local people do not go there? “The crack is gone from the pubs altogether,” said one local man. “The whole year round.” On the other hand your modern holiday homes have kitchens that are much better appointed than kitchens at home: virgin pastry brush, anybody? You can eat your locally grown organic lettuce (bought at the local shop) while listening to the thump of someone else’s tumble dryer, a piece of machinery which is, as we all know, an occasion of ecological sin. In draught-proofing alone the Irish holiday home is head and shoulders above what we’re used to. We’re fairly burning through the wine.
Yet it is quiet here; everybody says so. There are entire offices around the country in which it has become strangely vulgar to admit to going on holiday at all, just as the mid-morning cappuccino, bought off the premises, has become rather vulgar, and the shop-bought sandwich suspiciously profligate.
Some holiday home renters take their peat briquettes home with them. Because they are not drinking in pubs they can get through an entire fortnight without once using the local taxi service. In this atmosphere of frugality can the Irish holiday survive? With agriculture at a standstill and rural industries vanished like a bad dream, areas like this one will collapse if the tourist industry does not reinvent itself. Hopes currently seem to hang on the British tourist – ah, the Sassenach invader won’t get here a moment too soon. The British tourist is due to be released from captivity when the UK secondary schools break up for the summer at the end of this month. Then we shall see, even through the double-glazing.