During the 1970s and 1980s very few hotels opened in Ireland. Mostly they closed, with a number of historical premises disappearing for good. Among the most shocking losses was the closure and demolition of Dublin's Hibernian Hotel in September 1984, a decade after the Russell Hotel on St Stephen's Green had suffered the same fate.
At the time, the gracious world encapsulated by these national institutions seemed to have disappeared, and only the mass market sector of the hotel business showed evidence of growth. Had the Hibernian or Russell survived, they would be thronged with guests, because Ireland now welcomes more tourists than ever before. Bord Failte's statistics show that between the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the number of visitors to this State more than doubled from 2.8 million to 5.9 million, and the latter figure is expected to increase by a further 6 per cent this year.
The demand for hotel accommodation has never been greater, and the number of people working in the sector rose by 40 per cent between 1996 and 1999.
In the early 1990s there were approximately 650 hotels in the State, but before the decade had ended, the figure had risen to 826. Dublin now accounts for 17 per cent of the State's hotels, and 28 per cent of hotel bedrooms.
A lot of that growth was concentrated into the latter part of the 1990s. Hotels are expensive and, compared to other tourism projects, slow to develop, so many of those planned in the middle of the decade only came into operation towards its close.
Even with the tax incentives which have spurred so much growth in this area, the costs remain high; architect Hugh Wallace estimates that today the price of a new hotel bedroom will be £75,000 at the very least, and often more. But premises continue to open on a regular basis, especially in the capital.
Few of these arrivals in the market could be described as either architecturally distinguished or as enhancing the environment in which they are located. Hotel design during the second half of the 20th century is not an area in which Ireland can claim to have performed well.
Many of the larger premises opened over this period, often by the Jurys or Doyle chains, are notable only for their scale and the manner in which they take no account whatever of their surroundings. From the exterior they look no better than the tower blocks of Ballymun.
Inside, their decoration tends towards the pretentious; when the Berkeley Court Hotel opened in Ballsbridge in the early 1980s, for example, its lobby was furnished with antique chairs across which were hung ropes in case guests might want to sit on them.
There was, and still is, nothing Irish about hotel design in this country, unless a fondness for brass railing and faux 18th-century furniture could be considered representative of Ireland. Little has changed since the Berkeley Court, yet another monolithic block totally out of keeping with its surroundings, was first built. The great majority of hotels opened here during the present economic boom continue to show in their appearance that the primary concern is to pack as many guests into the premises as possible.
While some effort at decoration may be made on the ground floor, the upper levels invariably comprise serried ranks of identical windows behind which are packed large numbers of identical bedrooms. These rooms will be reached by narrow corridors indistinguishable from one another and enlivened only by a strip of patterned carpet and the occasional hung print.
Dreary, characterless and devoid of individuality, the modern Irish hotel offers visitors nothing in the way of either visual stimulation or a sense of place.
Externally at least, the Four Seasons Hotel nearing completion in Ballsbridge epitomises this phenomenon. Designed by the California architectural practice of Wimberley, Allison, Tong and Goo, it has been squeezed onto a relatively narrow site on the corner of the Merrion and Simmonscourt Roads and overwhelms every other building in the vicinity.
"The Four Seasons epitomises to me the very worst of design," says Hugh Wallace. "It's typical that here vast amounts of money are being spent and the result is completely inappropriate." Given the ongoing tourism boom, it could be argued that the unattractiveness and poor quality of many new hotels does not matter and certainly has not acted as a deterrent to visitors. As another architect, Niall McCullough, points out, "None of these places has been forced out of business by bad design."
But aside from economic concerns, there are two other arguments to be made against the mass of hotels which have sprung up in every Irish town and city. One is that the local population has to live with these hulking masses of mediocrity, inside of which the pitiful want of ornament or originality is disguised by rampant deployment of floral-patterned soft furnishings.
Dublin architect Derek Tynan argues that Irish design is epitomised by certain qualities, including "a definite muscularity and the robust use of materials like stone and brick." Nonetheless, he acknowledges that these features are almost never found in new buildings catering to the demands of the tourist industry. Instead, they exude global blandness.
This is the other problem with contemporary Irish hotels: there is nothing intrinsically Irish about them. In some instances, the reason for this is that the hotel in question has been developed by an international chain.
But whether the owners are local or foreign, for visitors the results are the same: far too often their encounter with Ireland will take place in surroundings which could be located almost anywhere around the world. The average new hotel here now has an identical appearance to its equivalent in Germany or Greece.
"It's not like going to Italy or France, where there is an expectation of good design," Niall McCullough observes, although he adds that since style is not the key feature of Irish hotels, "obviously for visitors it's not so important." Still, it would be a pity if the increasing numbers of tourists coming to Ireland were left with an impression that bad - or at best bland - international design was a characteristic of this country.