Building an attractive tourist trap

Despite its problems, Connemara remains one of Ireland's most beautiful landscapes - but is it doing enough to spread the word, asks Brian O'Connell

'The Ireland that I fell in love with 22 years ago, and have come back to every year since, is quickly disappearing," wrote Daryln Brewer Hoffstot in the New York Times in 2004. "One-lane roads lined with hedgerows have given way to superhighways. Small family run grocery stores have been replaced with American-style supermarkets, and the peace that once characterised Connemara has been shattered with the sounds of weed-whackers, backhoes and bulldozers."

Backing away from the bulldozing, Connemara harbours one of Ireland's most dramatic and seemingly unspoilt landscapes, marked by its sheer geographic unpredictability. At a time when other parts of Ireland are in danger of becoming authentically compromised, Connemara stands defiant as an outpost of pre-modernist rugged beauty.

Yet for all its natural resources, tourism in Connemara is facing a dilemma - how to attract and retain the 21st-century visitor without compromising the area's natural beauty. It's a problem compounded by the fact that the region is slow to market itself collectively, with individual initiatives remaining just that - individual.

"The problem with Connemara," observes Éamon Ó Cuív TD, Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. "Is that for too long, too many people have tried to market it in segments or tried to market villages on their own. The region as a whole needs to be marketed. If you went around America and said, 'do you recognise the following as being Irish?' and you said some small village in Connemara - they wouldn't know it probably. The logic then is to market Connemara from city to sea as one unit."

While Ó Cuív is refreshingly frank on Connemara's shortcomings, he is also quick to highlight the area's undeniable potential. "We need to identify clearly the product in Connemara, which could mean highlighting the unique culture, including the language, the angling, walking, cycling, driving and so on. Connemara is like a person who has been given the absolutely best site and best property in town, but needs a hand with developing and renovation to make it the best property. We have incredible raw material. The Rockies might be bigger and the Alps grander, but I know nowhere in the world with the same variety of scenery within such a limited area."

For any area of natural beauty to market itself effectively, there are two basic requirements: vision and finance. A relatively new organisation, Fáilte Ireland West, has key responsibility to sell Connemara as a tourist destination both at home and abroad. Yet obvious shortcomings remain: one of the area's main websites, www.connemara-tourism.org, is dated and far removed from a modern, sophisticated web portal, while the organisation itself doesn't collect exact tourist statistics for the Connemara region.

"We don't break tourist numbers down specifically," says Fiona Monaghan of Fáilte Ireland West. "Last year we had 1.3 million visitors to the west in general. The biggest thing we need is cooperation - we need to work with industry on presenting a more united front." Monaghan highlights infrastructure as one of the stumbling blocks preventing Connemara from reaching its full potential. Yet with the number of visitors to Ireland now reaching pre-9/11 levels, she feels Connemara can only benefit from this upward trend.

"Access is always a frustration," says Monaghan. "With improved air access in Galway, Ireland West Airport at Knock and also Shannon, the region can only grow. Along with this, the road infrastructure needs to be improved. Last year Ireland noticed a significant increase in tourist numbers - somewhere around 17 per cent. The market has undoubtedly suffered in the last number of years, yet this increase brought the numbers back to 1999 levels. It's taken six long years to get to this point, but we're moving in the right direction."

LEAVING CONNEMARA FOR a moment, it's worth looking at how other countries sell their own areas of scenic beauty. The Lake District is one of the UK's most popular tourist destinations, attracting upwards of 16 million tourists a year and generating £1.1 billion for the local economy. As a brand name it enjoys worldwide recognition.

Sheona Southern, marketing director at the Cumbria Tourist Board, offers some practical advice for achieving that recognition. "It's important to utilise marketing techniques, such as branding and slogans," she says. "This year, for instance, we have gone with the slogan, 'Love the Lakes', and we underpin this with logos of the Cumbria tourist district. This applies to our domestic campaign as well as international. You've got to have a unique selling point. In the Lake District, product awareness is really high, after that it's just a matter of getting providers and industry behind the brand."

Southern says the area has been quick to adapt to new technologies when implementing its marketing campaign. "With any area of natural environment the one thing you can't do without is fantastic photography. In recent years we have invested in that more than anything else. Gone are the days when you would organise a photographer for a few days' shoot. We now spend up to 10 per cent of our overall marketing budget on photography alone - last year our marketing budget was in the region of £1.5 million.

"The upsurge in new media is also crucial and vital to any travel business - you simply have to have a modern web presence."

Aside from keeping up to date with new media trends, perhaps the only sure-fire way of ensuring the continued success of a tourist region is to support and encourage local initiatives. "Ninety per cent of businesses in this area employ 10 people or less," says Southern. "I would say that local indigenous sustainability is the key to the development of any region - after that it's about getting the balance right."

Back in Connemara, Charlie Troy and Dearbhail Standún may just hold the key to providing local tourist initiatives with a long-term future. Over the last decade, the couple invested every last penny of their life savings into their eco-cultural retreat, Cnoc Suain - a 200-acre pre-Famine hill village of thatched and slated stone cottages dating back to 1691. Their idea was simple - to provide tourists with an authentic Irish village to come, stay in, and take part in traditional activities, such as basket weaving, gardening, learning a musical instrument, or daily lectures on areas of Irish heritage. It's an ambitious undertaking, turning what was a collection of rundown cottages and outhouses into a living heritage centre.

The couple are now at a financial crossroads and looking for government agencies to take up some of the slack. "In 1990, when we bought this property, we were thinking that the place was really Irish, in the sense that it had everything: it was an old farm, with part of it thatched, and to us it was everything Ireland symbolised to a lot of people," says Standún.

"We started to think about what was being offered to people who were coming to Ireland and realised that more and more they were not experiencing the real Ireland in terms of music, culture or natural history. Between us we felt we had the right combination - Charlie is a botanist and I have played with the band Dordan for many years - and the right place to offer an authentic experience."

While the project still has some way to go, this summer will be their first full season open for business. They have ambitious plans to expand the property to include artists' retreats, a working farm, field laboratory, kitchen and dining room.

"When we first began talking about our plans we were given little time. Yet with the changes in tourism it now seems as if we are kind of mainstream," says Charlie Troy. "We have had talks with Fáilte Ireland and Údarás Na Gaeltachta, and are hoping that we can develop a plan [ whereby] they will join with us to go forward and make the next phase here. Sometimes tourists or even the word 'tourists', conjure up the wrong image of people. In a sense we're all tourists when we go abroad, but people want more than just coming to a place and looking at something from a distance. They want to learn and feel a part of it."

The pair admit that the task to transform their property into a tourist destination is daunting. Yet, if Connemara tourism is to thrive in the decades ahead initiatives such as Cnoc Suain need continued support and encouragement.

"We began to feel after a few years that this project was taking us over," says Standún. "It has been so difficult at times to keep going. Ninety-five per cent of it is our own investment. It's been 10 years of work. But we feel confident that we are now in a position to offer something that is increasingly rare in Ireland - an authentic Irish experience."