Tourism board aims to make most of media spotlight during Real visit

TOURISM IRELAND has begun a marketing campaign to take advantage of the huge media interest around the visit of Real Madrid to this country.

The visiting press entourage that has been watching the team train at Carton House in Co Kildare will be given a briefing today on the delights of Ireland.

They are unlikely, though, to include the weather. Heavy rain accompanied their first training session as the vagaries of the Irish summer was apparent to the galácticos on their first visit to Ireland.

But the weather will suit the players. They would rather have the stamina-sapping early season training in the rain and wind of Ireland than in temperatures of 40 degrees in Madrid – the primary reason for choosing this country in the first place.

Tourism Ireland, which promotes the whole island, has placed signage around the training ground which carries its website address, targeting millions of potential Spanish holidaymakers.

The Spanish market is the fifth biggest for overseas visitors to Ireland after the UK, the United States, France and Germany.

Last year, 262,000 Spanish visitors visited Ireland. It is one of the few growth markets. Visitor numbers from Spain were up by 13 per cent in the first five months of the year mostly as a result of increased access from the big population centres of Madrid and Barcelona.

Tourism Irelands marketing manager for Spain Barbara Wood said the prospect of teeming rain, as evidenced from the pictures from Carton House, are what prospective Spanish visitors expect from Ireland.

“Spanish visitors come for the interaction with the people, the culture, the pubs . . . and the green countryside,” she said. “They certainly don’t go looking for the weather. They know what they are going to get when they get to Ireland. It’s not ideal if we get a huge amount of coverage and there is rain, but that’s Spanish people’s perception anyway.”

The prospects for the rest of the Real Madrid nine-day stay in Ireland are not much better.

For the time being at least the weather looks like it is going to conform to the legend of the 9th-century St Swithin.

The legend goes that if it rains on his feast day, which is today, it will rain for the next 40 days. It is due to rain today though not as heavily as yesterday; Friday will be drier, but there will be further showers on Saturday and Sunday.

The late Brendan McWilliams, in his WeatherEye column in this newspaper, often said there was some truth that weather patterns around the middle of July tended to stay fixed for weeks.

However, Met Éireann forecaster Gerry Scully said there was “no hard evidence” to suggest that St Swithin’s day will mean the rest of the summer will be a washout, though he said the weather will be unsettled for the foreseeable future.

“The weather doesn’t look like it is going to settle down though we will get the odd good day,” he said. “The one saving grace has been the temperatures. We have had temperatures well up there and quite high on occasions. There has been some very pleasant periods of weather unlike last year where it has been cold, wet and dull for most of the time.”

Real stars fail to ignite Carton: Sports Wednesday