In search of the lost idyll

This year may be difficult, but the Irish tourist industry is resilient, writes Robert O'Byrne, and our landscape, people and history have been luring visitors for over two centuries, even during the Famine, the War of Independence and the Civil War

Earlier this month, the State training body CERT announced that last year, for the first time in a decade, employment in Ireland's tourism and hospitality business declined. Indications are that 2002 will also be difficult for this sector, although CERT's chairman, Eamonn McKeon, insisted that "Irish tourism has proven to be a resilient industry in the past". Just how resilient is shown by a newly-published book, The Tourist's Gaze, edited by Glenn Hooper, looking at the responses of visitors to this country in the course of the past two centuries. It offers evidence that even during what must have been especially difficult periods, such as the Famine years of the mid-19th century and the War of Independence and the Civil War in the early 1920s, non-nationals still found themselves drawn here - and very often for the same reasons as those who have come to Ireland under happier circumstances.

In its present form, tourism is essentially a by-product of the industrial revolution, because the means of transport were made much easier by the invention of the steam ship and the railway train. Of course, from the Vikings onwards overseas visitors have crossed the Irish Sea and been received with a variety of welcomes. Prior to the first decades of the 19th century, the purpose of their journey was rarely just for the pleasure of exploring another culture. But from 1800 onwards, as Hooper makes plain in his preface, fascination with an alien world has - until recently - been a powerful draw for bringing outsiders here. It would be interesting to see whether this might still be the case. After the boom of the past decade which has seen so many multinational corporations come to dominate our economy, can we still claim to possess a distinctive culture? Does Ireland continue to offer travellers a unique experience or have we opted for global homogenisation?

These questions need to be asked precisely because modern tourism here arose from an idea that the country represented what Hooper calls "a lost idyll" and acted as "the keeper of a cultural purity". This Rousseau-esque concept of Ireland was a by-product of late 18th-century romanticism, enhanced during the first years of 1800s through the writings of authors such as Thomas Moore and Lady Morgan.

The image of an unspoilt land that they offered has remained the template for Irish tourism ever since, even if it no longer conforms much to the realities of the early 21st century. The image of an island uncorrupted by industrial development and its soiled legacy, a part of Europe and yet set apart from it: this is the ideal which has served to draw tourists here.

The landscape of Ireland has accordingly been one of our most important tourist assets and this remains the case even today, when so much of it has been altered, not necessarily for the better. Certain locations have proven consistently popular, among them Glendalough in Co Wicklow - despite being dismissed by one traveller in 1838 as only "not unworthy of a visit" - the lakes of Killarney in Co Kerry and the Giant's Causeway in Co Antrim. For 19th-century visitors, the last of these was especially appealing; an anonymous tourist of 1804 went so far as to describe a cave in the vicinity of the rocks as being "a sublime cathedral, built by God himself, and where the elements worship him". However, the same writer's opinion of the causeway itself was somewhat coloured by being viewed before breakfast, so that hunger "prevented me from lingering on the spot".

The Burren and Connemara have also long been tourist magnets, as have all sites containing ruins from Ireland's past, such as Cashel and Clonmacnoise. While Anne Plumptre's view of the former in 1814 was spoilt by heavy rain - surely another commonplace for visitors here - in the aftermath of the second World War, Kees van Hoek encountered such good weather when he visited Clonmacnoise that the sky appeared to be "a vast canopy of powdered silver-blue, and all Ireland seemed arrayed around us in all her riches along the banks of her mightiest river".

Another powerful lure for a long time has been the wish to make sense of the complexities of Irish culture and history. Hooper argues that what attracted travellers to Ireland in 1800 was remarkably similar to what brings them here now: "a desire to understand the country, to engage with the peculiarities of its culture, to speculate on its long-term political future".

The form and tone of that speculation appears to differ from one race to the next. From the time of Arthur Young onwards, for example, English tourists who wrote of Ireland have been keen to explain this country to their fellow-countrymen, attempting to make sense of what they for so long found to be a bafflingly intractable problem.

Typically, in 1890, the antiquarian Arthur Bennett published a book called John Bull and His Other Island in the course of which he examined already overt sectarianism in Belfast. Half a century before, William Thackeray in his still-read Irish Sketch Book attempted a similar feat when writing of that city and, like so many others, appeared baffled by what he called "the subdivisions of hostility" encountered there.

By comparison with the English, the French have consistently adopted a more romantic outlook when viewing Ireland, whether through the medium of such films as Yves Boisset's 1977 Un Taxi Mauve or Marie Anne de Bovet's book Trois Mois en Irlande, first published in 1891 in which Waterford is described as "dull enough" because it possessed "no aristocracy, no upper middle class, little money, the horizon bounded by local politics". The perfect setting, in other words, for an Irish equivalent of Emma Bovary.

Meanwhile, from the time of Prince Pückler-Muskau during the 1820s onwards, Germans have tended to adopt a pragmatic and fact-finding approach when travelling in Ireland. The prince could often be extremely punctilious in his reportage, as more recently was Heinrich Böll, whose Irish Journal appeared in 1957. The other nationality to come here in substantial numbers have been Americans and the most striking characteristic of their response to Ireland - as illustrated by the title of William Henry Humbert's 1888 Ireland under Coercion - is a desire to empathise with the local people. The people, indeed, have invariably been one of this country's principal attractions and numerous attempts were made during the past 200 years to encapsulate our personality traits. Naturally, the Irish love and use of speech features regularly, Alfred Austin in 1900 typically commenting that in Ireland "everybody has something to say".

IN order to indulge our need for conversation, we are usually perceived to be a particularly hospitable people, James Ebenezer Bicheno remarking in 1829 that although he had travelled here "in the most disturbed districts and among people who were sheltering murderers," nevertheless "the most cheerful assistance was afforded us in every difficulty". Could the same claim be made today by an overseas visitor? And would Bicheno's successors even necessarily encounter any representatives of the local population, since so many of our hotels, bars and restaurants now seen to be entirely staffed by workers who have themselves come from abroad?

This is just one of a number of changes which have occurred here in recent years and which must, sooner or later, have an impact on the nature of our tourist industry. Some of the differences between the old Ireland and the new are unquestionably for the better, such as the abolition of the terrible poverty which excited so much horror. But the great religious piety which was also for so long a much-remarked feature of the Irish character has also largely gone, at least in its public expression. Irelandtoday is far less obviously the Roman Catholic country experienced by John George Kohlin in the 1840s, when he noted that the Irish "have all kinds of pretty pious wishes always at hand". Nonetheless, other elements of the national temperament, such as our fondness for alcohol, remain all too apparent. If not the "drunken and improvident race" which appalled Henry Inglis almost 170 years ago, we are still prone to enjoy the quantities of drink imbibed by Gilpin Gorst when he was here in 1825. The numbers of beggars on the streets which he observed has probably not diminished greatly either, thereby confirming that despite the boom of the last 10 years, some aspects of Ireland look as though they will never change.

The Tourist's Gaze: Travellers to Ireland 1800-2000, edited by Glenn Hooper, is published by Cork University Press, €57.25 in hardback, €22.95 in paperback.