The call by the president of the Irish Hotels Federation, Mr Bill Power, to achieve a better regional distribution of the benefits of tourism, is very worthy but ignores a deeper problem. It is simply not possible to tell our visitors where to go. If they all want to stay in Temple Bar and nobody wants to go to Monaghan, then no amount of money will change their minds. Moreover it would be wrong as well as futile, to spend taxpayers' money to achieve the impossible. Mr Power argued at his organisation's annual conference this week that while Bord Failte reported a seven per cent increase in visitors last year, this was not reflected in his members' business. Many hotels outside the principal urban areas saw little or no growth in tourists. Mr Power did not dispute the tourist board's figures but said the seven per cent increase was largely due to business travellers, who do not stay in country hotels, and Irish emigrants visiting friends and relatives who do not need to stay in hotels at all.
Both categories of visitors are very welcome - for different reasons. The business traveller is, economically, the most valuable consumer of what Ireland has to offer in terms of top-class hotels and restaurants. People coming home to visit their friends and relatives copper-fasten the reality of an Irish diaspora with its important social and cultural dimensions. An extra seven per cent of such people enhance our tourist industry.
And yet Mr Power's concerns about the smaller country hotels and other accommodation units are not misplaced. In some parts of the country, particularly along the western sea board, tourism is often the only viable industry. Manufacturing is difficult where the terrain is rugged, the transport infrastructure inadequate and a skilled workforce impossible to find. But here lies the opportunity. Germans do not come to Ireland to re-encounter the Ruhr Valley they earnestly want to leave behind. They come to enjoy the absence of heavy manufacturing and motorways. International publicity about the Celtic Tiger worries them and Germany - our most important European market - has been faltering in recent years.
The most valuable asset of the rural tourist product is that it is family-owned. This fact should be as strongly promoted as the scenic beauty or the craic. The National Development Plan sets aside £150m for marketing Irish tourism over the next six years. This is a considerable amount of money and Mr Power is right to urge that it be focused in areas where it will do most good and not spent in scatter-gun fashion. It should not be spent, however, in telling our visitors where they should go. It should be spent persuading the discerning tourist that visiting rural Ireland is likely to provide a more satisfying holiday.
Mr Power is right to draw attention to the litter problem. This now amounts to a national disgrace. We have talked about it for years, overseas tour operators have warned us over and over again that it is seriously damaging our tourist industry, and yet the enforcement of anti-litter legislation is pitifully weak. As Mr Power said, we finally got around to dealing with the drink-driving problem through strict enforcement of the law. It is time to do the same with litter.