Cork's Jameson Experience honoured for tourism boost

The Jameson Experience in east Cork and the team behind UCC’s year-long George Boole celebrations were among those honoured last night for helping to generate more than €10m in conference and tourism business in Cork this year.

The visitor experience at the Midleton distillery, which will welcome more than 125,000 visitors this year, was named the region’s ultimate ambassador. UCC won a special academic award for its work on the George Boole 200 commemorations — with its conferences and seminars generating an estimated €1m — as the Cork Convention Bureau toasted Cork’s ambassadors.

The bureau, the agency responsible for promoting the region as a major conference destination, said combined, the ambassadors helped bring more than 13,000 delegates to Cork — 7,000 of whom were international delegates — in the last year alone.

It handed out six special awards at its second annual #CorkNeedsYou Cork Conference Ambassadors Awards ceremony in the Vienna Woods Hotel last night. The special Ultimate Ambassador Award was presented to the Jameson Experience in recognition of its “unparalleled economic and tourism benefit” with most of its 125,000 visitors coming from the US, France, Germany, Britain and Ireland.

The Special Interest Award went to Declan Tyner, district governor at Rotary Ireland, who secured an international rotary conference for Cork this year, bringing more than 400 delegates from Ireland, the UK and Portugal.

PepsiCo’s flagship Cork operations, which includes the company’s worldwide concentrate headquarters, received the bureau’s Corporate Ambassador Award for bringing its Global EHS Summit Conference to Cork.

More than 150 national and international delegates attended the five-day event, which followed on from PepsiCo’s hugely successful Global Auditors Conference, also held in Cork in 2014.

The bureau’s Association Award went to Geraldine Boylan, professor of Neonatal Physiology at UCC, who brought the international conference of brain monitoring and neuro-protection in the newborn to Cork in October. More than 280 delegates attended the event.

The year’s Academic Award went to the George Boole team at UCC whose year-long series of seminars and conferences, to mark the bicentenary of Boole’s birth, brought more than 700 international delegates to Cork, with a benefit of more than €1m accruing to the city.

This year’s Special Recognition Award went to Gerardine Lynch, chairperson of the Marymount International Conference Organising Committee, which hosted its first international conference on ‘Palliative Care and Care of the Older Person’ in Cork.