Aiming to return smile to Irish eyes amid ongoing fear of foot-and-mouth

After more than a month of 12-hour days, Mr Brendan Leahy is leaving the office early to take a weekend break in Sligo - not for one of the many bargain breaks being offered by Irish hoteliers or B&Bs, but back with his wife, Ann, to her home county. It's where he relaxes.

Not that the chief executive of the Irish Tourist Industry Confederation relaxes much these days. As head of the umbrella lobbying body for the industry - encompassing organisations as diverse as Bord Failte, Aer Lingus, the Car Rental Council, the Irish Hotels Federation, the Town and County Homes Association, and the Restaurants Association of Ireland - he has been front-of-house, trying to reverse the negative image of the Republic as a tourist destination following the one outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the State.

Tourism is second only to agriculture in importance to the Irish economy. It is worth £4 billion (€5.1 billion) annually, £3 billion of which comes in foreign earnings. Ironically, it is the industry that has suffered most as a result of the damage to our most important single industry.

"The industry has been badly damaged, even at this point, and despite the fact that things are easing off, new measures are coming in and there is an opening up of arrangements, we are still going to face a very difficult year where business is deteriorating.

"Up to March, an official survey indicated the industry has lost £230 million from overseas revenue. We have done a projection based on that which would indicate we could lose £500 million from overseas and £200 million domestic revenue if the deteriorating position doesn't improve - that's up to August. That's a 20 to 25 per cent drop in business. You can't turn this around very quickly," he explains.

As of April 19th, the confederation's update of losses is as follows:

Town and Country Homes (B&Bs) show bookings from North America are down 17 per cent, UK down 66 per cent and Belgium down 33 per cent. Cancellations and loss of business are valued at £5 million; the Incoming Tour Operators Association estimates that, since Easter, business loss will be £6.3 million due to slowdown and cancellations, with an estimated loss to June of £16.25 million; The Irish Hotels Federation reports a loss of £47 million between the beginning of the foot-and-mouth outbreak and the end of March; the Coach Tourism sector has lost £5.5 million since the crisis began; Irish Ferries has reported a decline of 33 per cent in the past three weeks; Aer Lingus says in the period April to June, traffic from the UK will drop by 15 per cent, with a possible drop of 20 per cent for April alone; losses in the region of £300,000 were incurred by just three car rental companies in the first three weeks of the crisis; some companies reported a drop of 30-40 per cent in bookings; and many farm house holidays have no income at all.

Mr Leahy's organisation has made it a policy to produce high-quality economic reports done by outside organisations for the Government, emphasising the economic importance of tourism, not its leisure nature. He sees it as "a case-making body" and one that has not been replicated in many other countries. "In the past we haven't been very well organised to talk with a single voice. A lot of the money we spend is towards positioning tourism at a national level. The difficulty with an organisation like this is to keep it cohesive because there are very strong individual sectors. We have been able to get agreement and consensus on two or three key issues over the last 10 years. It's a model that has worked well.

"To be fair to the Government, we have had a strong input into the National Development Plan, we're members of the social partnership, together with IBEC. The Minister for Tourism has given the industry a role in everything. He has set up Tourism Ireland Ltd, the North-South marketing body, which was very successful for arguing the case for flexibility for tourism [during the foot-and-mouth crisis]," he says.

The tourism industry has grown by between 10 and 14 per cent annually over the past 10 years and has had major investment by the big players in particular. Investment by the industry has been in the region of £6 million each year for the past six years - a lot of this in activity holidays, equestrian sport, fishing, golf, all-weather and conference facilities, as well as a huge investment in access transport, such as the £20 million spent on coach tourism in the past year. In addition, the industry spends around £103 million on overseas marketing, two-and-a-half times the Government's spending.

The industry did not exaggerate the losses from the foot-and-mouth scare, unlike some in the British tourism industry, he insists. "We're particularly concerned about May, June and into July, where many tours have been cancelled and whether we can get them back; we don't think we can. We think recovery will take two to three years. Much of the business lost won't come back very quickly because it switches to other destinations."

Mr Leahy is very pleased with the reassurance campaign abroad - including a huge advertising campaign - which has been set up by the Government and State agencies, but he is disappointed that the £10 million that the campaign requires has only £6 million in funding, half of which has come from the Department of Tourism and the rest from Bord Failte's autumn budget.

"The industry, at a breakfast meeting last week with Bord Failte, said that a £3 million injection from the Government at this point was not enough, bearing in mind we are a £3 billion industry, employing 150,000 people, with domestic tourism worth another £1 billion."

The next two to three weeks are crucial in winning back tourists this year. The President, Mrs McAleese, has been getting positive publicity for the Republic in the US and the campaign is now under way there, but a parallel campaign has to start in Britain immediately.

He says the industry complied in every way with the restrictions imposed by the Department of Agriculture and he pays tribute to the Minister for establishing the expert group that decided which restrictions were necessary at what time, "but you question whether some of the precautions were necessary".

He is "absolutely thrilled and it's psychologically important" that we passed the 30-day all-clear point last week. However, he adds: "It's now important that the mind-set that has been created will soften because people have become conscientious, a mind-set developed to protect Ireland from the holocaust in England.

"But the one thing that must happen now, particularly people in rural Ireland, should have a more generous and balanced response to visitors. We need to change that negative attitude very quickly. We need to redouble our efforts and the public generally needs to redouble its efforts to welcome people. And the use of language - plague, disease - has to change."