Weather, football and traffic limit race benefits

It was unfortunate for Irish tourism that France won the World Cup

It was unfortunate for Irish tourism that France won the World Cup. As a result, French television coverage of the opening stages of the Tour de France was curtailed - and people's attention was more on celebrating the football victory than on watching the Tour in Ireland.

France's second TV channel had planned mammoth coverage of the Tour de France in Ireland. But then France beat Brazil 3-0 and the priorities of the station switched to football. Tour coverage was scaled down, but was not abandoned.

The Government paid the Tour de France £2.1 million to have the opening stages here. The Prologue time trial in Dublin on Saturday transmitted the classic image of Ireland to the French TV audience: rain.

However, Sunday and yesterday's more benign pictures of the sunny south-east, from Enniscorthy to Cork, were far better.

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Anne Zemmour of Bord Failte's Paris office yesterday said the images of Ireland portrayed on French TV on Saturday were "a bit grim" because of the darkness of the weather. At the same time however, Ms Zemmour added that reports coming back from the French media were unanimously enthusiastic about the welcome the Tour had received in Ireland.

Mr Frank McGee, manager of Dublin Tourism, said it was difficult to get a measure of how valuable the Tour would be.

"It was three or four years after Dublin was European City of Culture before we began to see the benefits. I think it will be the same with the Tour," Mr McGee said. "The weather was against us, the football was against us" but, he added, the reaction from the media was uniformly positive.

Mr McGee paid particular tribute to An Bord Bia and sponsors like Guinness and Irish Distillers, which had used the occasion to showcase the best of Irish food and drink to over 1,100 foreign journalists.

Mr Tom Coffey, chief executive of the Dublin City Centre Business Association, said his food retailing members, who were expected to do well, reported a decline of up to 90 per cent in weekend trade.

"It was not so much the Tour de France as the Siege de France," said one Dublin publican who had expected Saturday to be like St Patrick's Day. Instead, customers could not gain access to his pub for most of the day and staff were sent home.

Mr Coffey queried the wisdom of paying the Tour de France to come to Ireland in the middle of the high tourist season. "What sense does it make to subsidise tourists in July?" he asked.

The association was not opposed to the bringing of major sporting events to the capital, Mr Coffey said, but they should not be accompanied by major traffic disruptions which defeated the purpose they were designed for - an increase in trading activity. The association represents about 500 retailers in Dublin with a collective annual turnover of £1 billion. Mr Coffey said they expect the results of a survey later this week to indicate how much the Dublin stage of the Tour cost members.

He reckoned that the Tour brought only 100,000 extra people into the city centre compared to the extra 250,000 who come in for St Patrick's Day.

Mr Gerry O`Connor, general manager of the Blarney Park Hotel, said Cork city hotels which would be normally quiet at this time of the year were heavily booked. The city was covered with red, blue and white balloons which he hoped the French TV cameras would pick up.