The Minister for Tourism, John O'Donoghue, wants us to stop talking about rip-off Ireland in case we scare away the tourists. It's all a myth, he said last week, and the talk of it has gone too far and has to stop, writes Mary Raftery.
Contrast this with Mary Harney's statement last April that she was "increasingly disturbed by stories of rip-off Ireland and the time has come for some radical new thinking in terms of our approach to consumer issues".
Her radical new thinking was to set up an advisory body, the Consumer Strategy Group, to advise on the issue. We haven't heard a peep out of them yet, however. They are not due to report until next year.
The reality is that despite Mr O'Donoghue's wishful thinking about myths, rip-off Ireland remains alive and well. Just this summer, we again topped the EU league table as the most expensive member-state for a basket of staple groceries. It is instructive to look at the EU bar chart for this - for most countries, the bars are roughly equally sized, bunched around the average; for Ireland, the bar leaps upwards, showing us a whopping 40 per cent more expensive than most of the rest.
When you realise that the rest includes many of the Scandinavian countries, whose high costs we used to speak about with awe 10 years ago, the sheer magnitude of what we have to pay out for ordinary goods on a daily basis is stark by comparison.
We have had the incontrovertible evidence of these somewhat dry, lifeless comparative tables for some years now, but what really brings the contrast to life is people's direct experience of tourism and holidays, both in Ireland and abroad.
Stories are legion of Irish people being shocked speechless at how cheap it is to eat out and buy goods literally everywhere else in the world. The same stories are told in reverse by foreigners holidaying here in Ireland. But instead of burying his head in the mythological sand, John O'Donoghue might be more usefully employed in analysing why it is that holidaying in Ireland is so expensive.
One element in the explanation is to be found, strangely, in the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001. Widely presented as a disaster for Irish agriculture, the truth was in fact the direct opposite. A little publicised report published in 2002 by the Department of Agriculture and carried out by independent consultants Indecon laid out the startling fact that the agriculture sector actually benefited financially from foot-and-mouth to the tune of €107 million.
The sector that bore by far the largest economic burden was tourism. The foot-and-mouth outbreak cost it an estimated €210 million for 2001 alone. The Indecon consultants emphasised the likelihood that in fact the cumulative losses would be even greater, with the inevitable knock-on effects into subsequent years.
Despite its pleas for help, the Government did very little to alleviate the problems of the tourism industry.
This was in sharp contrast to its provision of enormous financial assistance to the agriculture sector. With agriculture accounting for a little over 3 per cent of GDP, compared to 5 per cent for tourism, serious questions need to be asked of the Government's priorities around this issue.
The reason of course that agriculture did so well with its somewhat unseemly profits from the foot-and-mouth crisis relates directly to the enormous lobbying power of the farming industry. Put simply, when the Irish Farmers Association shouts jump, the Government meekly asks, how high. When the tourism sector, or indeed the consumer lobby, screams from the rooftops for assistance, it is ignored, or at best thrown the sop of an advisory body to report at some unspecified time in the future.
Proper strategic intervention in the aftermath of the foot-and-mouth outbreak could have served to keep prices down in the tourism sector. It is most likely, and hardly surprising, that those involved sought to recoup at least some of their losses by increasing prices.
This in turn is now seriously endangering the future of Ireland as an attractive holiday option not just for foreigners, but also for Irish people who are increasingly of the view that you would need to be mad to pay the kind of prices demanded in restaurants, hotels and bed-and- breakfasts around the country.
In one of the great understatements of the year, John O'Donoghue says that Ireland has never been a low-cost destination for tourists. It is, he claims, one "for the discerning traveller". The truth, however, is that most travellers with even a modicum of discernment will avoid our high prices like the plague. Sadly, this is not an option open to those of us living here.
While up to this point we have alternately fumed and whinged about rip-off Ireland - to very little effect, it should be pointed out - we are now told that we have to shut up about it, in the national interest, of course. This is adding insult to injury. If ever there was a time for the consumers of Ireland to rise up, it is now.