The Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation, Dr McDaid, was supposed to talk about "the changing Irish tourism product and the importance of the French market".

But most of his audience - and the Minister - had been celebrating Ireland's rugby victory until 4 a.m. at the James Joyce Pub and Kitty O'Shea's.

Events had overtaken his speech, the Minister said, abandoning his text to appeal to 15,000 Irish people working in France to come home. Whenever Irish ministers travel abroad, he said, "the Taoiseach always says, `tell them we want our young people to come back' ". In 1998, Dr McDaid noted, 44,000 Irish people returned.

Mr Michael Farrell was one of them, but after years in France, the Irish businessman said he was appalled by the litter problem back home. In all research conducted by the Department of Tourism, litter and signposts were the two main complaints, the Minister admitted. The litter problem could be lessened if present laws were enforced. In 1997 there were only two litter wardens in Dublin Corporation. Last year there were 20. "It's progress," Dr McDaid said. "But 20 wardens to cover 1.3 million people is not enough."

The Minister's tourism pitch to the French businessman invited by Bord Failte and the Franco-Irish Chamber of Commerce was a mixture of miserabilisme and sports. Perhaps he had seen posters all over the Paris metro announcing the March 22nd release of Angela's Ashes. Nearly six million tourists - 263,000 of them French - visited Ireland last year and Dr McDaid believes sports are a particularly effective way of advertising the country.

He has established an £2.5 million fund to attract major sporting events. "It cost us £7.6 million to bring the Golf Ryder Cup to Ireland in 2005," he said, but that would be amortised over several years.

The people who built the Stade de France are interested in bidding on Ireland's new 80,000 seat National Stadium, "which will be a statement of where we Irish are in the 21st century".