The global economic recession now under way looks likely to have a major impact on tourism in Ireland. Bord Fβilte predicts that overseas revenue could this year drop by as much as £200 million, with visitor numbers also expected to decline by some 500,000. These are very substantial figures and their scale means no sector of the industry can hope to remain immune.
However extreme it eventually proves to be, the downturn could prove helpful in allowing time for consideration about the consequences of rapid growth in certain sectors of the tourist business. One such sector is golf. Over the past decade, this area of the market has undergone remarkable expansion, frequently aided by State and EU funds. As a result, thousands of acres of the Irish countryside and coastline were fundamentally, and often irrevocably, altered. This development took place to meet the needs of what was believed to be an ever-growing market.
But what if this expansionist strategy, which received approval from central government, local authorities and official tourism bodies, was ill-advised? What if demand among overseas visitors for golf now stops growing and perhaps even goes into decline? What will then happen to the many courses developed in the past few years, and all the others still planned for some of the most scenic and environmentally vulnerable parts of the country?
From the early 1990s onwards, golfing in Ireland became established as a substantial business, with many companies set up here to cater for what appeared to be an insatiable demand. Organisations such as Golf Tours Ireland, Golf Vacations Ireland and Golf Travel Ireland offer overseas aficionados of the game an opportunity to play on some of our most popular courses. From the Irish tourism industry's perspective, such visitors merit approval because they are usually prepared to spend a great deal of money.
The September issue of US Golf magazine, for example, reckons that the average five-day golfing holiday in Ireland, including accommodation, green fees and travel, costs in the region of $2,254. This figure is confirmed by the latest statistics from Bord Fβilte showing that golf tourists on average spend 50 per cent more than other overseas visitors, making them an especially attractive prospect; the total sum annually spent on the game here by tourists is estimated to be more than £100 million. And despite the high costs involved, the number of overseas visitors who played the game while in Ireland during the past year reached 219,000; this compares to just 52,000 in the late 1980s, shortly before the rapid expansion of the industry began.
These figures help to explain why the promotion of Ireland as a golfer's destination received such a lot of official support. Between 1989 and 1993, for example, the state tourism board provided approximately £12 million to help fund the creation of 27 new golf courses that would be of an international standard and offer guaranteed access to tourists.
Since then, the amount of money from Bord Fβilte to this sector has greatly diminished, but financial support could still be found elsewhere; the newly completed Greg Norman-designed course at Doonbeg, Co Clare received £2.4 million from the EU despite widespread protests from environmental groups about the damage this development could cause to the region.
There are now about 430 golf courses in Ireland, almost a quarter of them designed and built in the past decade at a total cost of £300 million. The creation of a new golf course is never cheap; Doonbeg had a budget of £12.5 million. Many more sites are proposed for the years ahead, although whether all of these schemes will go ahead remains to be seen; investors may be more apprehensive about a development's success when some courses admit to difficulties. Three weeks after the bombings in New York and Washington, the controversial Old Head of Kinsale golf club, which was created specifically with the American market in mind, announced 100 cancellations - at green fees of £190 each - in one day alone. The club expects to lose 2,000 rounds by the end of the season, while SWING, an organisation promoting most major courses in the south-west of Ireland, reported that bookings had dropped "down to a trickle".
Because golf was supposed to offer economic salvation to many parts of the country that enjoyed few other advantages, little thought was given to the long-term consequences of widespread development; significantly, until May 1994 golf courses were exempt from planning controls. It was left to a handful of voluntary environmental groups to point out the potential dangers of this explosive growth. During the 1990s, they watched as valuable, sometimes even ecologically unique, sites were transformed in an effort to attract high-spending tourists, supposedly for the benefit of local communities and their economies. Environmental groups' efforts to present an alternative perspective were made all the more difficult by golf schemes receiving official support. Doonbeg, for example, was promoted from the very beginning by Shannon Development, which first secured the 337-acre site, while four years ago the Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation, Jim McDaid, was happy to announce that this country was emerging as "one of the world's primary locations for golf".
But, as Tony Lowes of An Taisce argues: "Despite all the talk, there's usually no spin- off for the locals. Golf tourists are car-based visitors who just drive into the area, play a game and then leave again." Any jobs created as a result of these developments tend to be low-skilled and low-paid, meaning relatively little money goes back into the immediate community. In future, Lowes suggests, depressed rural communities "would be better to look elsewhere for their economic salvation".
Moreover, he notes, many landscapes destroyed to create golf courses can never be recovered. In the rush to gratify the requirements of the golf tourist, some of Ireland's most significant and historic estates have undergone total transformations. Among the best-known of these is Carton House in Co Kildare, where two courses are due to open next spring; Straffan - otherwise known as the K Club - in the same county; Powerscourt and Druid's Glen (formerly called Woodstock) in Co Wicklow; Fota in Cork; and Mount Juliet in Co Kilkenny. But there can scarcely be a county in Ireland that has not seen at least one old estate reordered into a golf course, often by an international designer who has only visited the site on a handful of occasions and has limited understanding or interest in the locale. With the disappearance of these parklands, an important part of the country's heritage has also been lost for ever.
For many environmentalists, an even greater worry has been the creation of new golfing resorts close to the sea because of the impact on the Irish coastline. According to Karen Dubsky of Coastwatch Ireland, golf has posed "an enormous challenge to some of the most stunning landscape, often created over thousands of years, especially on the west coast. These sites can be archaeologically important and be the last residual areas of very rare plants."
Dubsky also worries that the maintenance of golf courses does not allow the natural evolution of a landscape to take place. "Management companies put hard erosion-control policies in place," she says, "and these have an effect on the whole area."
The consequences of a potential decline in the golf tourist market here have yet to be measured, but should this occur a fast recovery is unlikely. At the moment, the most vulnerable courses are those most dependent on the American market, because the number of tourists from the US has dropped sharply. The most recent figures available show that Americans account for approximately 30 per cent of the golf business in Ireland, exceeded only by visitors from the UK. A Bord Fβilte spokesman points out that on previous occasions when the number of tourists from the US declined, such as in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, it took three years for the figures to come back up to their previous levels. A possible scenario for the year ahead may therefore be that some recently opened golf developments will face financial difficulties as the income they predicted fails to materialise; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a shortage of paying clientele caused a number of new English and Scottish courses to go to the wall.
If there are problems in the period ahead, they will almost certainly be exacerbated by the large number of additional courses still scheduled to come on stream, especially as most of these are aimed at the top end of the market. Not only are Carton and Doonbeg preparing to open within the next 12 months, but second courses are planned for Druid's Glen, Powerscourt and the K Club. Elsewhere, entirely new developments are under consideration.
Both Karen Dubsky and Tony Lowes, together with many other observers of Irish golf's rapid expansion, note that courses rarely exist in isolation but are part of a much larger development in the vicinity. Most new schemes follow the model of Mount Juliet or the K Club, where the course itself is surrounded by club house and hotel, large-scale housing plus the requisite amount of surface parking, all of which demand a substantial acreage. Few of the completed developments of this kind are notable for their architectural or design merits.
For this reason, Dubsky fears that should a tourist crisis occur in the Irish golf industry, the result might be still worse environmental damage as investors seek ways to recoup their money. "They're unlikely to leave the infrastructure," she argues. "What's much more probable is that they'll consider an alternative use for the courses, such as even more housing, because some of that's already in place." Courses facing financial difficulty might, therefore, become enormous housing estates. Whether or not this occurs, surely an opportunity has been offered to reassess the game's expansion here and to pay some attention to the long-term consequences? Otherwise the country could end up possessing an abundance of over-priced and under-used golf courses.