Whether it’s festivals or flights, private enterprise is going berserk
It was not the first of the festivals, but it was undoubtedly the most successful for many years.
It was conceived by a few public-spirited businessmen in an effort to prevent Tralee losing one of its three days of horse-racing, lest the meeting would degenerate into a flapper as owners would hardly be prepared to go so far for just two days of racing.
The festival began with a carnival and a carnival queen until somebody got the bright idea of exploiting the song and selecting a Rose of Tralee. The festival put Tralee on the tourist map and many new B&Bs, hotels and other examples of tourism infrastructure resulted.
The race meeting thrived and was actually extended over six days, with other race meetings also introduced during the year. But since the takeover of the festival by a private company, it is no longer held in conjunction with the races. A special meeting of racecourse shareholders is currently planned to consider the future of the place.
A few years ago some of shareholders had hoped to sell Ballybeggan Park for housing. There are so many empty houses and apartments now around Tralee, with more being built, that many people marvel at the idea of how anyone thinks there is a need for more housing.
Building houses and apartments is providing employment, especially for the growing immigrant community. Of course, the immigrants are taking up much of the slack in the market for houses, but when the houses are built, what is going to provide employment — more immigrants and thus more houses? Sooner or later it is going to be necessary to find other forms of employment, especially since we seem intent on destroying the employment associated with tourism.
Private enterprise is going berserk. The Rose of Tralee festival is now a private company, supposedly being run for profit. Before its privatisation, the festival was particularly innovative, especially in the early years. It billed itself as the ‘Folk Festival of Ireland’ just as the folk music explosion was about to occur.
The Fureys and Wolfe Tones first made their names in Tralee. In fact, the first time the Wolfe Tones were ever heard on RTÉ, they were recorded live in Tralee in 1963 singing the Orange anthem — ‘The Sash’. One newspaper critic wrote at the time it was “extraordinary to hear a group of young men with rather pronounced Dublin accents singing The Sash in the Deep South!” Each year there was something new and exciting. One of the earliest initiatives was the introduction of dramatic street lighting, purchased from Blackpool. This year the festive lighting will be confined to a side street — Denny Street — while the main streets are reduced to green and gold bunting. If its lasts long enough, which seems unlikely, it might be used to welcome home the Kerry team.
In the light of former years, it is absurd to call the Rose of Tralee a festival anymore because it is now essentially a TV pageant. It undoubtedly played a vital part in putting Tralee on the tourist map over the decades, but in the words of Bob Dylan’s song, ‘the times, they are a-changin’.
The festival started around the time the government was beginning to recognise the potential of tourism. Bord Fáilte gave grants for the construction of large hotels, which provided much needed employment, but this week we saw the closing of Jurys in Dublin and plans were announced earlier to close the Montrose and Burlington hotels. These are all apparently going to be turned into glorified apartments. With all the talk about building new stadiums, where will the people stay to fill them?
A few years ago a businessman told a story about going to Dublin for a rugby international. He booked into a B&B. On the way he stopped off for a meal and got involved in watching a game on TV, so he called ahead to say he would not get there till around 10pm.
The owner seemed a bit put out and when the businessman arrived, something seemed familiar. The owner had a face as long as a wet weekend.
“Did I stay here before?,” the man asked. “You did,” the owner replied, breaking into a laugh, “and you told me that if you wanted to book into a monastery, you’d book into one!”
B&Bs are not to everybody’s taste. The way we are going, however, we may need the monasteries to replace hotels. The people of this country helped to finance the infrastructure for tourism, but now that infrastructure is being sold off as part of private enterprise. This is also what has happened with the national airline.
It seems absurd to tell Aer Lingus to run itself as a private company with the ultimate aim of making itself totally self-sufficient and providing a return for its shareholders, and then at the same time complain that it is behaving in a selfish way. Its difficulties should be particularly apparent in the light of the contemptible way in which the pilots and their union have been seeking to exploit the current crisis for their own selfish ends without regard to the damage being done to the company. The airline was established in the national interest, but the public who financed it have been betrayed — not by Dermot Mannion or the board of Aer Lingus or the pilots and their union, but by the Government.
IT was Cromwell who infamously said “To Hell or to Connacht!” Now our Government is essentially saying “to Hell with Connacht and the west of Ireland”.
Folk memory should set alarm bells ringing in the west. Little more than a century and a half ago, the potato crop failed and people in the west starved. We blamed the British then because they did not know, or care, what was happening in the west of Ireland. Are we returning to this mentality? If Aer Lingus decided to use those precious slots at Heathrow for flights from New York or Chicago, instead of from Dublin, what would happen? The Government would come under so much pressure that it would promptly use its shareholdings to insist Aer Lingus must act in the national interest.
The politicians will see sense now if the public makes it clear they will hold Fianna Fáil responsible at the next local and general elections. This is about more than private enterprise; it is about democracy and the desire of the overwhelming majority of people to have Shannon maintain its links with Heathrow.
It is also about more than the west because Cork and the south will be next. It would only take a handful of Fianna Fáil deputies with guts and a sense of duty to make the Government see sense — if they announced they would bring the Government down before the end of October unless the Shannon decision is rescinded. The Government, presumably, held on to so many shares to protect the public interest.
If there is not even a handful of politicians in Fianna Fáil with guts or integrity, then God help us all.
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