Fáilte Ireland is chasing the wrong tourist

LAST November, l,000 German travel agents were brought here to promote Ireland as a tourist destination.

This was a total waste of taxpayers’ money. Travel agents are now more or less a thing of the past.

Most of us use sites like Trip Adviser to find out the pros and cons of the country we hope to visit.

It is cheap flights and affordable accommodation that inspire people to travel to new destinations – not images of luxury hotels with gourmet meals.

One has to thank Michael O’Leary for allowing most of us to visit cities we hardly heard of 10 years ago.

It is time Fáilte Ireland was brought into the 21st century. First of all it could link up with the 1911 census national archives website and start to tackle the British market seriously.

A British visitor told me she had been in Ireland three days before she heard an Irish accent. No one she dealt with in the hotel was Irish. She could have been in any part of the world, except for the weather. She just wanted to reimmerse herself in Irishness, but she was disappointed – she would have met more Irish people at home back in Coventry. She wanted to see the townland her parents emigrated from, but who to ask?

Coventry, Manchester, London, Birmingham and Glasgow have enough Irish people to fill all our hotels, but they want value for money.

On my yearly visit to Stafford to my cousins I was able to get a beef dinner for approximately £7 in the local pub. A cousin told me there is a discount for pensioners – now this is something Fáilte Ireland could run with.

Why not have something like that here to attract British pensioners? We are still trying to catch fish in a pond with a silver lure more reminiscent of the Celtic Tiger years.

All most people want is a half decent place to stay, good music, friendly locals and reasonably priced mid-day meals. They don’t want to spend nearly €3 for a latté or a glass of Coke. At present even our fast food outlets are much more expensive that the equivalent in Paris or Carcasonne.

In these recessionary times it would cost more to spend a week in Ballybunion than four days in New York, and that is without putting your foot on a plane. It is time for us to get real.

Fáilte Ireland should be using its money to get more Irish people back into the hospitality sector – is that not what it is supposed to be about? Why is it not ensuring our well educated young people find a place in the tourism industry? Surely a man or woman should be able to rear a family on a waiter’s wages as they do in other countries like Italy or France. It is not the minimum wage that is the problem – it is the profit margins that cripple Irish tourism.

Nuala Nolan

Bowling Green

Galway