How the little people can save us

GIVE ME A BREAK :TOURISM IRELAND'S new €47 million campaign encouraging visitors to lose themselves in Ireland's mists of time and fantasy is a hoot. I mean hot. It's on the money, writes Kate Holmquist

A green and hilly island where leprechauns, storytellers, musicians and maidens lie in wait to delay you with their magic is precisely how the Americans, French, Canadians and British perceive us - but how able are we on this island to meet the challenge? If you haven't seen the campaign, I'll fill you in on the gorgeous ad that will be appearing in the best publications abroad.

Imagine a verdant land where people travel about in vintage VW vans from one spectacular vista to the next. Imagine, as they say, all the lonely people - Irish people - just waiting to waylay you and bring you into the pub for a few stories and rounds of Guinness, sprinkling you with magic dust as you head back to your hotel.

To truly do your part - and it is a brilliant concept (I'm not being sarcastic, because we're desperate, aren't we?) - you have to put yourself in the mindset of a foreigner whose "Ireland" is a place of the imagination. It is a place of winding roads rather than EU-funded motorways, a place where the locals appear at the doors of white thatched cottages to wave and peer at you, and, if they ask you in, still have portraits of JFK and the Pope hanging in the front room. There's a good breakfast of pork products and eggs to be had, buckets of tay and a few potato farls (north of the Border) and brown bread (south) for good measure.

Imagine . . . some day you will join us.

Actually, do join us. This vision of a 1940s Ireland preserved for all eternity is our only hope. Now that the Celtic Tiger has let us down, we need the Celtic Revival à la Maud Gonne and Yeats to save us.

Fás wouldn't do it. Getting your hair done at Solutions in West Cocoa Beach would be absolutely against trend, unless you were getting it dyed red in order to come home to be a perfect Irish colleen. And as for Nasa - how obsolete it seems, unless the alien-seekers can discover the land of Lir and all its seven children and offer charter flights at a discount (two weeks for the price of one, including spa treatments and leprechaun sightings, free for children).

Wait - maybe Fás coulddo the job. This could be the solution for a controversy-struck organisation that needs a fresh image. Fas (Fast Aggressive Solution) might work. It could stop training people for disappearing jobs and join with Tourism Ireland in the ultimate cure for our economic catastrophe. The bankers, stockbrokers and variously talented people made unemployed by the global money meltdown could be encouraged immediately to start manufacturing pots of gold. These pots (strategically positioned at the ends of holographic rainbows, courtesy of Ireland's magnificent software industry) would be entirely worthless, but who's to know? Because the bankers, property speculators and others who have spent the past decade convincing us that our tin was gold are ideally positioned to convince our foreign visitors that their tourist cash can become gold too! This really is a brilliant idea and I hope you all are taking this in because this is your one and only chance to invest.

Ireland Inc doesn't have to become Ireland Sink. We could become Ireland, the lost land of joy and fairytales, with the backing of Tourism Ireland's campaign. And here's how we could make this dream a reality: all the Riverdance refugees(tired of touring and in a mood to settle down and have babies) could immediately start dancing and fiddle-playing at crossroads up and down the country. They could work from home (though not a mortgaged one - more like a camp, as nobody can afford a mortgage any more).

Then we could rope in those lawyers and politicians who, intentionally or not, are adept at confusing tribunals and public alike on money matters. They are ideally skilled to be wily leprechauns, even if some of them would need their legs shortened by our fabulous health service.

As for those ordinary folks losing their jobs before Christmas - look forward to St Patrick's Day! The new-style Fas would hire you to sit in the pub all day on the lookout for tourists seeking their roots. You might have to dress in an ill-fitting Sunday suit and a báinín jumper knitted by your unemployed sister or a child in Asia, but as long as you'd chew that Irish pipe made in China and spin yarns, you'd keep your work placement. And just think of the satisfaction you would get out of showing our guests the real Ireland.

You high-flying businesswomen out there who can't cut it any more because your salary doesn't meet the childcare costs - you could just send those kids to leprechaun school and open a BB.

Start baking scones, women! Turn that fifth bedroom into a tourist haven! With a little effort, this wee land of ours will be a success.