The new director-general of Bord Failte, John Dully, will not suffer the embarrassment of one of his predecessors - being found on holiday abroad. Dully has spent the last 17 years on holiday in West Cork. He loves the combination of wildness and sophistication of the Beara Peninsula. The only golf club he belongs to is Glengarriff. "I'm a brutal golfer", he tells friends, "but I've got a great temperament."
He will need it in the new job.
Bord Failte is an organisation without morale. The staff cannot understand why the most sustained success in the history of tourism has not been matched by a corresponding respect among politicians for the main body promoting tourism. Now the top job has gone to an outsider, Dully.
The current problem began with the dropping of the logo which was intended to "brand" Ireland, North and South. Development of the logo was financed by Bord Failte and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board and carefully nurtured by Noel Toolan, a former Grand Metropolitan executive who became director of international marketing with Bord Failte.
The Minister for Tourism, Jim McDaid, did not like the logo, he thought the Irish shamrock was not prominent enough. He ordered it dropped. There was no consultation with the co-financiers, the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, which in the event decided to retain it. Noel Toolan resigned from Bord Failte. He was followed by Orla Branigan, head of marketing in Continental Europe.
Even more dramatically, the director-general of Bord Failte, Matt McNulty, decided not to accept the terms of his reappointment which the board offered last April and he too resigned. This is the organisation Dully now inherits. He also has the problem that two of the three short-listed candidates for the job were two senior executives who must now report to him. The favourite at the start was Joe Beirne, the director for North America. Beirne had also worked as director for Continental Europe and held a number of senior positions in the Baggot Street headquarters. The other internal candidate was a young highflier, Paul O'Toole, who is based in the head office.
Dully's prospects changed when McDaid appointed three new directors to the Bord Failte board in July. He gained new support, and is thought always to have the support of the former civil servant, Padraig O hUiginn, who serves on the Bord Failte board and is a £1,000 per annum special adviser to McDaid. Dully has told friends that he acknowledges the morale problem at Bord Failte. He attributes it, however, to the departure of three senior people rather than the arrival of an outsider. "Bord Failte is full of really good people," he told one acquaintance, "and leadership is what they need."
Dully's qualifications are hardly in dispute. As assistant secretary in the Department of Tourism, he was responsible for developing the policy climate aimed at achieving foreign earnings from tourism of £2.5 billion by 1999 and the creation of 35,000 extra jobs in the industry. Both targets are on course.
He is chairman of the monitoring committee for the EU operational programme which has seen £650 million invested in tourism over the past five years.
He is involved in consideration of how the island of Ireland will be promoted internationally in the light of the peace process. Bord Failte and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board have been largely excluded from this consideration, as the politicians and civil servants have kept it to themselves. One idea actively canvassed is that a new all-Ireland body to promote tourism would be based in Belfast rather than Dublin. Dully has had two great disappointments in his career. He won an All-Ireland Colleges medal with St Mel's of Longford against St Brendan's of Killarney in 1963. However, the following year, St Mel's were beaten by St Jarlath's of Tuam.
To add insult to injury, the match was played in Dully's home town of Athlone. (He is ecumenical in matters of football. He secretly played soccer in Athlone, a grave crime in the 1960s if St Mel's found out.)
The more recent disappointment came in 1995 when he lost out to Margaret Hayes in a bid to become secretary of the Department of Tourism. "He took off in an unmerciful sulk," says one source in the tourist industry. In fact, he took a 15-month leave of absence from the Department and went to work in Moscow for an Irish telecommunications company called Artel. One of Artel's directors at the time was David Andrews, now Minister for Foreign Affairs.
Dully's big challenge now is to restore morale at Bord Failte. But he must also come to grips with the fact that the generous EU funding of the past five years comes to an end in 1999. The Minister, Jim McDaid, has said the tourist industry must pick up most of the slack. The industry has said the Government gets so much tax from tourism it should pick up most of the slack. Resolving this dilemma is likely to occupy much of Dully's first year in the job.