Ireland's Visitors
By DESMOND FENNELL THE most widely loved of our visitors are the British working people. This is because they are the most numerous and at the same time the best-humoured, the most patient, docile and free-spending. When, occasionally, during the holiday season, I have stayed for a night in some guesthouse or small hotel in one of our seaside towns and have seen these British queueing for admittance to ill-equipped bath- rooms or waiting patiently for their fries in drab dining-rooms, I have wished that this most numerous tribe of our visitors were not so patient and were more demanding. I have wished it for the sake of the Irish, who might then have a hope of better hotel accommodation below the 'luxury' level.
Our middle-type hotels, our guesthouses and restaurants have been making all sorts of technical improvements over the past few years of State-sponsored tourist development, but ugliness and shoddiness are still commonplace and it is the likeable English working people who are largely to blame for this. They accept here what they accept at home, a divi- sion of the amenities of eating and lodging into two broad categories—the best and the drab. Admittedly, the English best is better than the Irish best; but the English ordinary is so far below the ordinary level of service and amenity in most of Western Europe that it provides no proper model or inspiration for a developing tourist industry such as ours now is.
Anglers in general and the British coarse-fish angler in particular have been getting a lot of attention. The coarse-fish man is one of the easiest fellows to please. A clean bed, a good lunch-pack, cheap bait and a kitchen where he can take his boots off—even better, a whole house where no one raises ructions if he stamps through it from end to end without taking his boots off: these are said to be his requirements. In the coarse-angling districts many farmhouses have been refurbished and put at his service and, if there is a bicycle available and a hope of fish, he is the happiest man alive.
More and more British, French and Germans are coming for the nobler forms of angling and every town on the Atlantic seaboard now tries to have a sea-angling festival. There is a boom in boat-building both for the lakes and fdr the ocean and bar lounges are being widened to accommodate all those horizontally outstretched arms. The British fishin' and shootin' type has been joined by the German industrialist seeking Ent.spannung away from all the Betrieb. They sit at breakfast-time in hotels which were for- merly stately homes and watch droves of Ameri- cans being shepherded onto buses after one- night stops and discussions about 'itiner-aries.' The British were the first to give us holiday camps for the masses, but the Germans have been the first to buy stretches of earthly heaven on the Mayo coast for conversion into luxury chalet settlements which (we hope) will gradually replace Arosa. Even in Killarney, whose fame has been made by the Americans, it is the British who are favourites with the jarveys and boatmen. The Americans may foot higher bills, but they throw less money around and always believe that they are being diddled. Throughout the country we have several big new hotels going up which are meant to cater almost exclusively for AmeriCans and the provision of more beds in the luxury class' is a prime aim of official, State- guided tourist policy. Of course, many of the Americans escape our notice, really, for they are staying on the ancestral farm in Cork, Cavan or Mayo.
There is a kind of American visitor who is often lovable (though we make jokes about him) —the American on a 'literary pilgrimage.' Joycean Dublin, the Yeats country and the Aran Islands where Synge collected his folk-talk are places where you will come upon him. But he also visits libraries and consults professors. He sits in Dublin bars and coffee-shops and talks ever so earnestly, questions reverently, seeks metaphysically. It is the faintly unreal and religious air about him which makes us both love him and laugh at him kindly.
The literary intellectual from London is a different kettle of fish. If one is to give any credence to what he writes afterviards, he always comes in winter or at least when it is raining and never for a holiday. Why he comes is not quite clear, but certainly it is never to find out anything—all that he wishes to know about the Irish he knows long before. What he writes after- wards conforms so faithfully to an established pattern that we are now quite adept at dealing with him, for we know exactly where to bring him to see everything he expects to see, thus enabling him, with a minimum of effort, to return home a reassured man. He never asks questions to which he really expects an answer, for he seems scared to death of anything which might surprise him and truthful answers are often surprising. So we don't surprise him. Worse, and to our eternal disgrace as hospitable Irish people, we never ask him to an ordinary Irish home.
The Australians must be mentioned in con- nection with hostelling, for, when the statistics come out every year, there are the Australians at the top of the list! They probably see the best of Ireland, but they see it quietly and without spending much money. The current official view is that tourists who aren't a source of national income are a sort of national failure.
If an Irish town today wants to set up a fountain or build a swimming-pool or mend a promenade or build a theatre—if the great theatre city of Dublin wants to run a theatre festival—then this must always be justified in terms of tourist expenditure. 'It will attract tourists' is the strongest argument if you are Paddy Murphy or the local 'development com- mittee' looking for a State grant. But the argu- ment has even wider validity. It shows you have your feet on the ground and are not just pursuing beauty or culture or civic amenity for its own sake like an irresponsible yahoo. It shows that you want to get richer and want everyone else to get richer and this is the main public criterion of virtuous endeavour and serious-minded effort in Ireland today.
Every visitor who comes to our shores ought to be aware that a great deal of money, both public and private, has been invested in him; that he is a factor in industry, though he may believe he is on holiday. Common decency will then compel him to give an adequate return and to see that his mite is not missing when Bord Failte--the Tourist Board, literally, the Welcome Board—gets around to publishing ic millions of pounds sterling the exact statistics of the annual shearing. For on the continuing increase of that annual figure Bord Faille bases its claim to existence and the Irish people, to $ growing extent, their claim to be a hospitable nation.
The damnable thing is that there are plenty Of us who still see in the visitor what the ancient Greeks saw—a man 'sent by the gods.' Not by the money-god to make us rich, but by the good gods to exercise us in goodness. We love to pour oil in his wounds. We love to show hire our peaks and crevices, mark him with Oilf mark and send him on his way again, loaded with presents, and above all with our bittersweet, most Irish present of uneasiness and nostalgic longing.
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