Did Tourism Ireland really need to ask British tourists whether they found this country exotic? One might as well ask visitors to Iceland their opinion of the Reykjavik olive groves. This is Ireland. We don't do exotic. This is the land of one-off bungalows for mile after mile after mile. This is land where planning permissions follow money like rooks the plough. This is the land where, come closing time, the final question of the night is, which fight you join.
We do corruption pretty well. We are rather expert at illegal dumping. We're not bad at fish-kills either. We know how to plonk a visitors' centre so that it will cause maximum visual impact over the widest possible area. We know how to study the experience of every other country in Europe, and not learn a single thing. We know how to create bottleneck monopolies in our roads network and hand them over to a couple of important, well-placed individuals to erect toll-booths on. We know how to drive a motorway through the sites of an ancient civilisation of which little is understood. We know how to pour ten zillion euro into our medical system, while patients are sleeping under umbrellas in the hospital flowerbeds.
Apparently, Tourism Ireland even had the gall to ask British tourists if they found a visit to Dublin a cultural experience. Well, it certainly is if you think that traffic jams are high art. We have the full range here - the greater crested traffic jam, the two-toed traffic jam, the traffic jam in two acts which ain't over until the fat lady sings, the tragic one about the Danish prince, Jamlet, and the one involving the National Symphony Orchestra, the Red Cow Roundabout, and Casement Aerodrome, otherwise known as The Jam Busters.
But if you're not interested in traffic congestion, carbon monoxide poisoning or death by chewing your steering wheel in frustration, and it seems many visitors are not, then Dublin is hardly the place for you. Take a map of Italy, and stick a pin in it at random, and you'll find more cultural excitement in whatever town you've skewered than you will in our capital.
There is an acid test for the cultural vitality of any community, and it is this: how many string quartets does it have? An average crossroads, bus-stop or even zoo in Hungary or Spain will have more string quartets than all of Ireland.
If you live in London, it costs about the same to fly to either Dublin or Paris, and takes the same amount of time. All right, what's it to be? Paris with hundreds of restaurants, the Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, the Opera House, Les Invalides, and so on, or Dublin, with Supermac's on O'Connell Street, a Grafton Street that is identical to Reading town centre, and young men, and even a few young women, urinating and breaking wind in shop doorways at 2am. It's a hard choice, I know, so I'll give you a couple of minutes . . .
So the suspicion must be that the 4.5 million Britons who come here are not on a Mensa outing.
Which tends to be confirmed by the surprise of many British tourists that there is so much rainfall in this country. How can even readers of the Daily Sport be taken aback by that? It is no coincidence that so many Irish people do not pronounce the "h" in "weather". This is not a speech impediment or even dialectic characteristic, but a simple statement of the meteorological truth.
This is also an explanation for our preference for a republic: presidents don't reign.
So why do so many Britons - actually exceeding the number of residents in this country - come here on holiday? Well, some presumably can't read very well and think that Paris is spelled with a D and a U and so on. Others come here because Tourism Ireland have got agents in Heathrow who switch the signs around at the terminals, and all those eager visitors for Spain are diverted onto flights to Dublin. When they arrive, they probably think that Baile atha Cliath is Spanish for Barcelona.
They will naturally want to see the Nou Camp home of the famous soccer club, and ask the driver to take them to El Footballo Stadio, but might be a little disappointed when he shows them Home Farm. Nonetheless, that's the high point of their visit.
Their attempts to see a bullfight end with them gazing at the rear end of some incontinent heifers at Mullingar cattle mart in the rain. Then it's back home again, with many muffled oaths about the Johnny Spaniard, and the Armada only got what was coming to it.
But these are in the minority. Most British people who come to Ireland do so deliberately. They live in a land which contains the Highlands of Scotland, the Cotswolds, East Anglia with its hundreds of medieval churches, the Lake District, London, Oxford and Cambridge, and they turn their back on all that to stand in a downpour in the centre of Dublin trying to find our National Opera House or our National Ballet Dance Theatre on their sodden maps.
It's odd, isn't it? Paul O'Toole of Tourism Ireland reports that what British visitors like is the hospitality and friendliness of the natives. Of course. Tourists try to light up in a pub or restaurant, and they are promptly shown the door, where they can shudder in the wind and the rain, alongside the other freezing exiles, watching the nearest fight. And they've crossed the Irish Sea for this. Blimey.