By the time this article is read, I shall be on holiday with family and friends which, I believe, is the best kind of holiday. No more articles to write for three weeks. Just some desultory preparations in free moments for a US university lecture tour in late September, writes Garret FitzGerald
I'm afraid that the inhabitants of the United States are not really holiday-minded. This was brought home to me when I recently had to talk to 40 US insurance brokers about the European economy. In the course of a post-lecture question time, one of the group expressed a strong view that Europe could never catch up with US productivity because Europeans take too long holidays.
Holidays, I tried to persuade my interlocutor, are a form of consumption, rather than a negative factor in productivity, which is measured by the average purchasing power created by an hour's work.
Now Americans appear to prefer to work more weeks than Europeans in order to be able to buy more goods or services with their cumulative hourly output. But Europeans, I explained, were less hung up on buying goods and services, preferring to set aside some of their potential purchasing power per hour to buy more leisure in the form of longer holidays. This seems to me a perfectly valid choice; arguably, indeed, a preferable one in human terms.
I have to admit that he remained unimpressed by my argument. To him holidays simply represented a reduction in output. And that, he clearly felt, was a bad thing. But I still think that I had a point.
I simply believe that we in Europe are right, and wise, and more civilised, in giving holidays a priority over slaving for a greater number of weeks every year to buy more goods and services. It is, I believe, a very good thing that in Europe employers are required to give their workers at least four weeks' holiday, twice the standard US period of annual leave.
Incidentally, although this point is rarely made, the cost of annual holidays is relatively small. Two additional weeks of annual holiday reduces annual hours worked by only 4 per cent, the same as a reduction of about 20 minutes in our working day. And for my part I think it is far better to have double the period of annual holidays than to work a mere score of minutes less daily.
Of course, not everyone may agree with me on that. One cannot generalise about humankind, and I know there are some people who don't bother with annual holidays. Traditionally this was true of many farmers, for example, although in some cases this simply reflected the impossibility of getting anyone to look after their livestock. But for most people holidays are important. Working hard throughout the year in an industrialised society, we need at least one decent break each year.
Fifty years ago we spent about 1 per cent of our income on holidays. Today this has risen to 4 per cent, but in the intervening period the purchasing power of the average Irish income has at least trebled, so the total volume of holiday spending has risen over tenfold in the past half-century. But, even today, farmers spend only 2.5 per cent of their income on holidays as against 7 per cent for urban dwellers, who on average now take two holidays a year.
Most Irish holidaying is now done abroad. Less than a fifth of our holiday nights are spent in Ireland, and only one-ninth of what we spend on holidays (technically defined as a period of four or more days away from home) is spent in Ireland.
Tourism, which in the 1990s earned us more than we ourselves spent holidaying abroad, is no longer a positive item in our balance of payments. Last year we spent almost one-fifth more on foreign travel than the country earned from tourists visiting Ireland. In 2002 Irish residents made over 4.6 million visits abroad. We don't know precisely how many travelled to continental Europe because some went through Britain. But if the proportion of Irish visits to the Continent made via Britain is similar to the proportion of such trips by continentals coming here, then the total number of trips to the Continent by Irish residents must have been about 2.6 million.
Some 35 continental European airports are now served by almost 70 daily direct scheduled flights from Dublin. When I joined the staff of Aer Lingus 56 years ago our only direct access to the Continent was a thrice-weekly DC3 flight to Paris.
Direct flights to and from the Continent are now carrying 150 times as many passengers as was the case back then.
So much for the statistics. But it is the human side of all this that is really important. My own experience is that when one has been working hard, a short holiday can be of little use.
I have found that the first five or six days of relaxation have often involved getting more tired before I begin to recover. Three weeks away is really the minimum needed to restore mind and body.
When I was in political office, I never apologised for taking good holidays. By taking a long break in summer, as well as extended periods at Christmas and Easter, I found the energy to work very hard indeed for the remaining weeks in the year. Mind you, being seen to take a holiday can have its downside politically. In January 1982 when I was Taoiseach for the first time, Joan and I took a break in Tenerife. One day, emerging from a swim in the sea, I saw a photographer with a long-lens camera taking pictures - of girls, I assumed. An hour or two later I heard that heavy snow was threatened at home in Ireland.
Next morning I rang for news and was told that the country was effectively closed down by a huge fall of snow. The only way home we could get home was via Toulouse, where the government jet, then at Shannon, could pick us up and bring us back to that airport, Dublin being completely closed. From Shannon a helicopter would bring us to Dublin.
I instructed that my arrival place and time in Dublin should not be announced. But when the helicopter landed, at St Vincent's Hospital for some reason, it was besieged by photographers. The best I could do was disembark carrying my portable typewriter, in the vain hope I might be thought to have been working on the nation's affairs while away. (Actually I had been revising a paper on the decline of the Irish language between 1770 and 1870).
Two days later, while the country was still snowbound, the papers carried a photograph of me emerging from the sea in Tenerife. Within a fortnight my government was defeated in the Dáil, and we faced another election. I can't help feeling that this holiday had a marked political downside.