But the cost of car hire was the issue that staggered the Belgians. They will hardly be surprised then to learn that, along with Austria and Switzerland, we are indeed the most expensive in Europe. And having paid through the nose for the car, what do they find? No surprises there: fastest climbers in the visitor dissatisfaction stakes are bad roads, rotten weather (doh!) and poor signposting, in that order.
Fall back on public transport, however, and they may find themselves - as one Dun Laoghaire guesthouse owner reports - in a two-hour wait just to get into the city on a Saturday night. Getting out again is something else. Three English guests who joined a taxi queue in the city centre at 3 a.m. finally made it to Dun Laoghaire at 6.30 a.m.
Hit the railways at the wrong time and they could end up standing all the way on a three-hour slog while fending off the hordes battling towards the inadequate, under-staffed bar and restaurant car. That's if there is one at all. Anecdotes about the state of the boat train from Wexford, not to mention hard details from the latest rail safety report, are enough to pitch a foreign body straight back into the arms of the car hire companies. The Lonely Planet guide reports that Co Kerry can be "drizzle-bound" for 270 days a year. To that attraction may now be added the Mallow to Tralee railway line - used by about 250,000 people a year, many of them tourists bound for Killarney - now starring in a draft report as one of the most dangerous routes in the State.
In any event, having sorted out their transport problems, our tourists set off around the country, to find . . . Well, let's return to Pierre Josse, of the Guide de Routard: new holiday villages destroying the landscape at places of great scenic beauty; popular sites thronged with cars and coaches; roads made dangerous for cyclists; and sites further degraded by the presence of fast-food operators. "In July and August," comments a Dutch operator, "it is not uncommon to experience traffic jams on your way to fishing in Connemara." To which you might add the perpetual ribbon of Persil-white bungalows glaring out of an ancient, rugged landscape, a squillion "mobile" homes despoiling shorelines, the sinister, triffid-like growth of golf courses - and litter.
One French visitor, a marketing teacher, put her amazement in print: "I can say this without fear of contradiction, that in two weeks of driving around Ireland, my group did not pass one 100metre stretch of road which was not strewn with litter, all kinds, from plastic bags, to tin cans to domestic rubbish . . . Mid-way into my trip, I was counting the minutes to catching my plane home to Paris."
One famous survey found that although one in six innocent souls expected the Republic to be cleaner than their own countries, one in four concluded afterwards that it was dirtier.
Meanwhile, marketing strategists who wallow in the eccentricities of rural Ireland, its quaint little communities and cute patchwork landscape, might note that the Irish countryside is undergoing a radical overhaul. Within the next 12 years, according to Teagasc, the number of farming families will fall from 155,000 to 35,000. Forget for a moment the individual devastation and imagine the changing panorama. In the words of Conor Skehan, a Dublin-based environment consultant: "If we lose the people and their links with the land, we will be left with just wet hills which will be as empty as the Highlands . . . Having half a dozen people who look like walk-ons from the set of The Field means the area is dead, as dead as last year's mutton."
Back in the capital, a suggestion of where some of these former rural dwellers may be headed is contained in the comments last week of Dublin Tourism's chief executive, Frank Magee. He cited the two main obstacles to the city's tourist boom as "the proliferation of beggars and people sleeping on the streets in broad daylight . . . tourists being intimidated by beggars in places like the Ha'penny Bridge . . . a sad indictment of the Celtic Tiger". This is backed up by an Irish Times letterwriter who describes being "accosted by no fewer than eight young beggars in the space of 20 minutes" on Christmas Eve.
Meanwhile, we developed a need for a Tourist Victim Support Service. Five years into its existence, it has handled more than 1,700 cases referred to it by the Garda, but must run on a shoestring.
Comments on the Internet refer to such inanities as tourist offices being closed on bank holidays; of no bureau de change at Dublin Ferry port; and of visitors being unable to get Guinness on tap in a restaurant. Where, in this often sunless land are the bright, clean, imaginative, well-run public recreation facilities for families such as can be found in Paris for example? Is there a not-so-subtle message in there that official Ireland doesn't really welcome children, any more than entrepreneurial Ireland?
Oh, we are certainly cool. Cool and arrogant enough to be considering all sorts of levies on tourists just for wanting to enter this little candy shop. So there's the proposed Government levy to fund our tourism marketing drives, i.e. a sort of penalty on tourists to pay for the cost of getting here in the first place. That would be on top of the £3 overnight levy being considered by Dublin Corporation (despite Frank Magee's projections for surplus accommodation by 2002). Then there is the proposed Aran Islands levy. And let's not forget the £5 Government levy we all pay for the privilege of leaving the State.
And can we stay cool in spite of it all? Certainly we can. Current predictions about changes to the Gulf Stream suggest that in 100 years, we could be setting up little souvenir stalls on the frozen Liffey. Now can you think of anything cooler than that?