Tourism faces a shower of spanners not quite out of the blue

THE problem about the weather changing before the bank holiday even arrived is having nowhere to vent our resentment over sunshine deprivation.

We're cheap drunks when it comes to sunshine. A few days with enough warmth to justify a visit to the beach and we fill up with optimism. If those few days happen in springtime, so much boundless unjustified optimism runs into us, we end up standing in the overflow. Against all the evidence provided by memory we even develop a conviction that this year we'll actually have a summer.

Imagine that. A summer as sweet and golden as the balmy versions experienced before the First World War. A summer filled with children doing real childlike things like building sandcastles, as opposed to being glued to a Playstation. A summer allowing parents to be experts again, gently showing toddlers that trying to dig a hole in dry sand is not as productive as going down nearer the sea to the hard, slightly damp stuff and that taking home a bucket full of pinkeens is not good for those miniature fish taken from rock pools, because they would miss their mammy.

The deportation of pinkeens, since time immemorial, has always been prevented on the same grounds. They get repatriated to the sea at the end of a warm day for family reasons. All of them come from one parent families, did you notice? No pinkeen ever gets put back in the sea because it would miss its father. Barefoot on the beach, we repeat the eternal verities we learned as children: "If you take them home, they'd be dead by tomorrow morning, they'd miss their mammy so much."

The optimism engendered by sunshine is so pervasive and powerful that coming up to this bank holiday the Met Office people, knowing that they had to sound a note of caution, went into overdrive. Having got the drop in temperature off their chest, one forecast became firmly detailed about the possibility of a bit of damp in the south. It spoke of "scattered outbreaks of showery rain". No hope, then, of a deluge of spanners.

Showery outbreaks of spanners may well be in our longer-term forecast, though. Gulf War II may be over but this does not mean that all the Americans who had put plans to visit Ireland in abeyance will take them out of abeyance and leap on transatlantic flights straight away. Many of the older potential visitors have other problems to cope with, and those problems have knock-on effects in two areas second homes and overseas holidays.

Just as Irish people with a little disposable income to spare have tended, over the last few years, to invest it in a second home in the south of France or in Spain, so Americans in their 50s and 60s have bought houses and apartments in states far from their New York or Boston or Philadelphia homes. The pattern of use is similar, too.

In the beginning, when the priority is to get on top of the repayments, the house or condo is briefly and sporadically visited by its owners, but is most frequently occupied by renters. Then the owners begin to spend chunks of the winter in their second home, gradually becoming what Floridians call "snowbirds" migratory visitors who get into their tightly packed cars before Easter to spend summer back home and return in the "fall". Eventually, the length of the commute back home begins to outweigh the reward of seeing friends and family. The first home is sold and the second home, down south, becomes the only home.

The last 18 months have put a crimp in that pattern. Some older Americans who relied on a monthly income from equities have found that income drying up. As a consequence, those in the early stages of second-home ownership the stage where the alternate residence is somewhere between a luxury and a hobby have been abandoning the dream and selling up.

Property prices in favourite second-home locations like Florida have not yet dropped hugely, presumably because the sellers want to get rid of the condo, but are not desperate to do it the day before yesterday. However, the number of properties available has vastly increased, as has the length of time taken to dispose of those properties.

What this has to do with tourism in Ireland is not obvious at first glance, since it would seem safe to assume that if you have a home in Massachusetts or New York or Philadelphia and a second home in the sunny south-east (meaning Florida, not Wexford/Waterford), a holiday in Ireland would be OTT. In fact, however, the two-homers belong in the demographic group most likely to holiday in Ireland, and that's the group whose income has dropped substantially in the last year or so.

"Oh, fine," I hear you say, as you shake sand off your folded newspaper and do a surveillance sweep to ensure one of the children is not braining the other with a bright red spade or turning blue in the extremities from the east wind. "So we don't get as many tour bus tourists. So what?"

So we may not get family tourists from America, either. The fact that the Americans have won the war in Iraq confuses rather than concludes the terrorism threat. Terrorism is new to the United States and Americans haven't settled into the kind of instantaneous risk-assessment Irish people are used to. For example, it seems odd to us to hear that school bands are not traveling from one American state to another because of terrorism.

Add the tedium of lengthy security checks and you have a good reason for making the decision millions of Americans tell market researchers they're going to make this summer drive to the holiday location, rather than fly. Which, of necessity, restricts the places families choose as holiday venues. You will tend to go to grandmother's house or spend 10 days in Disney World rather than fly to Ireland. Even if you keep your eye out for great airfare deals, the ones you monitor are more likely to be domestic than transatlantic.

Younger, more sophisticated American holiday-makers, unencumbered by family and less fearful of in-flight terrorism, might have been expected to take up some of the space at Shannon vacated by troop planes this summer.

However, those potential visitors, already uneasy about long plane flights and SARS, may have been rendered even less confident yesterday by a headline on the front page of the New York Times travel section describing as "a mixed blessing for fliers" the turmoil among Europe's discount airlines, notably Ryanair and EasyJet.

"In their rush to expand their fleets, lure passengers and cut down on airport turnaround times for their planes," said the paper, "the low-cost carriers are struggling against a perception among many travellers that the chances of delays and the likelihood of a cramped flight are greater than on flag carriers."

All these unrelated factors coming together may limit the number of Americans visiting Ireland this year. On the other hand, if the tourist industry could survive foot and mouth, it can also weather a showery outbreak of spanners.