All over Ireland, it seems, communities are madly rushing to feed the tourism market by developing "attractions" such as visitor centres where their culture and heritage can be fleetingly "interpreted" for the passing trade.
This mania has been led by the State, which has spent millions of pounds in EU aid on often ill-conceived projects such as Mullaghmore, in the heart of the Burren, where some sort of visitor facility is still planned despite a long-running environmental controversy, now in its seventh year. Other European countries do not share our passion. "One thing always struck me as extraordinary is the lack of interpretative centres in Italy," says Mr Peter Pearson, of the Heritage Council. "There's nothing at Pompeii or Herculaneum or even at the Roman Forum, where you could do with a bit of explanation. You're left to work it all out for yourself."
Adare, the Co Limerick chocolate box village with twee gingerbread houses, has a new heritage centre which one local newspaper likened to "the fire station at an unimportant West African airport". Visitor numbers at many centres expensively provided by the State have been disappointing. While 220,300 people visited the neolithic monuments in the Boyne Valley last year, the Lusk heritage centre in north Co Dublin attracted just 129. Admittedly it is only open one day per week from mid-June to mid-September.
Even the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre attracted only 11,346, while the numbers going to the award-winning Ceide Fields centre in Mayo and the Blasket centre in Dunquin, Co Kerry, hover around 40,000 apiece.
In some cases, such as the Boyne Valley, the provision of visitor centres is intended to ease pressure on priceless monuments. Access to Skellig Michael, off the Kerry coast, is restricted for the same reason. At Clonmacnoise, which drew more than 142,000 visitors in 1997, measures are being taken to spread the load more evenly throughout the year.
The Boyne Valley Visitor Centre is the busiest, with more than 220,000 people passing through its portals last year. It has acres of landscaped car parking, with a high proportion of French, Italian, German and British cars. A special section is reserved for tour buses, also mainly carrying foreign visitors fascinated by Ireland's answer to the pyramids. Inevitably, there is a lot of "herding". New arrivals make their way to the visitor centre and are immediately asked whether they want to visit Newgrange, Knowth or both. They are then given a badge to match their stated preference and told what time the next minibus is departing. Admission is just £2 - probably far lower than it should be.
The centre contains a multimedia exhibition outlining what is known about the Boyne Valley monuments in a user-friendly way. It contains just about enough for the casual visitor, including a half-baked mock-up of the passage tomb in Newgrange - an audiovisual presentation illustrating its relationship with the Earth's orbit around the sun.
Fortified with a light snack in the tearoom which serves a limited menu, we made our way across a suspension bridge over the Boyne, down a spiral ramp and then across two timber bridges to the circular enclosure where the Heritage Service parks its five blue Mercedes minibuses - three headed for Newgrange and two to Knowth, where the main mound is closed for reconstruction. Having experienced Newgrange already, we went to Knowth where a guide used four faded panels depicting what it looked like at various stages - in the Neolithic period, the Bronze Age, the early Christian period and the late middle ages. Then we walked around it, marvelling at the carved kerbstones - now sheltered by a modern concrete shelf.
At various points, the guide held up photographs of the long-running archaeological excavation at Knowth and explained that the mound is now being "backfilled" prior to its re-opening, probably next year. Tour over, we made our way back to the bus pick-up point to be whisked back to the visitor centre along Meath's narrow, bungalow-dotted roads.