There was talk some time ago about the way Ireland is marketed abroad as a tourist place. Up to now, from those continental publications seen on a regular basis, there has been consistency of theme Europe's green holiday island, a place of tranquillity and space, with western cliffs featuring often in the photographs and, certainly for Germans, the telling statistic that this country has something like 5,600 kilometres of coast.
And there's usually quite a lot about singing pubs.
In a recent copy of the coloured magazine which accompanies the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit, Wolfram Runkel returns to Kerry after twenty five years and gives his views under the heading "The Miracle of Kerry".
It wasn't the sun that used to call Germans to Ireland. It was forty shades of green, plus a book by Heinrich Boll and the feeling that you weren't just an ordinary tourist. He says that much has changed, and does so in about three thousand words.
It opens with a smashing photograph of dark cloud over a long Kerry beach, covering two pages, which could sell the place to any one, another double page spread of the interior of a singing pub, and nearly as much colour in a shot of the rising road in Dingle. He first came with wife and son. Now alone no explanation. Yes, there are more Germans about. Many living full time there. More building, of course, and while the traditional forty shades of green were slightly modified by the unusual sunshine of 1995, the peace was still to be found, the long strands, the open seas.
Change back home for him too. When he first visited Ireland, only two pubs in his home town of Hamburg sold Guinness. Now it's all over the place. And, he thinks, Ireland has forty kinds of German beer. The woman who sells you tickets for a boat trip out to Fungi, the dolphin, is a German who has settled nearby. A lot about pubs and the risen cost of guest houses, every Irishwoman something of a hotel chef. Change, yes, but there are places where you hear only the roar of the breakers and "everything looks as it did 25 years ago or 25,000."
Not a word about interpretative centres.