'PEOPLE WHO come to Ireland on holiday are invariably advised to go either to Achill or the Aran Islands. Maybe they are well advised; they seem to get over it quite well, and have even been known to return. I suppose it depends on the sort of thing you're used to", writes RICK LeVERT
A mildly sardonic way of recommending to holidaymakers that they skip Achill and the Aran Islands altogether and head to Kilkenny instead, but this is how Frank O'Connor went about it in his 1950 travel book Leinster, Munster and Connaught. "With its sensuous hills, its trees, its river-valleys and the blue mist that rises from them, and its absence of furze," O'Connor went on to write, "Kilkenny is the loveliest of Irish counties."
At first glance, this is nothing but a little tongue-in-cheek plug for one part of the country over another; hiding beneath its surface though are some rather large questions indeed about the history and heritage of tourism and travel in Ireland.
There are questions about the people who for centuries have travelled these shores for pleasure: who were they, what did they seek or seek to escape, and what did they find? There’s also questions about those advisers, travel writers both foreign and domestic, like O’Connor; the stories they told, the recommendations they made, and the degree to which their image of Ireland and the Irish shaped the tourist experience.
Perhaps most importantly, there are questions about the desires of those tourists – or at least our perception of their desires – and how they’ve shaped us, economically and culturally. For if hospitality is all about making a stranger feel at home, at what point does our home become indistinguishable from what we think they want our home to be?
Many of the answers are sure to be found in the University of Limerick’s recently unveiled Ciarán Mc Anally Tourism and Travel Collection. Spanning over 400 years of writing – and 50 years of collecting by the late Donegal-born solicitor – the collection represents one of the most comprehensive resources on travel and tourism within Ireland.
Long before the days of eBay and online auctions, Ciarán Mc Anally scoured booksellers and thrift shops, antiquarian and specialist catalogues, at home and abroad, gathering everything that in the broadest sense touched on the topic of travel in Ireland. His notebooks, now also a part of the collection, illustrate his passion for collecting.
In one, under the heading “Wants”, his cramped handwriting records the full bibliographic details of books on his wish list, such as John Dunton’s “Dublin Scuffle” of 1699, or an 1897 translation of Captain Cuellar’s narrative of the Spanish Armada and his adventures in Connaught and Ulster in 1588. A neat little checkmark next to a title seems to indicate the wish had been fulfilled.
Rare editions aside, the uniqueness of the collection comes from Mc Anally's foresight in collecting ephemera – the tourism brochures, pamphlets, and timetables that typically drift towards the bin once their immediate purpose had been served. That and his penchant for acquiring sequential editions – of William Makepeace Thackeray's Irish Sketch Bookalone he amassed 85 different editions.
According to Gobnait O’Riordan, director of Library and Information Services at the university’s Glucksman Library, this makes it possible to research subtle shifts and changes in the evolution of tourism in Ireland.
A QUICK GLANCEat some titles from the collection also reveals some not so subtle differences in perspectives on travel in Ireland: God in an Irish Kitchen; Views from the DART; The Black North; The Dreaming Shore; Land of Hope and Glory; The Miseries and Beauties of Ireland; Dapping on Lough Derg; Ireland for Everyman; Ireland by Motor Coach; and Ireland on anything from $15 to $50 a day.
In the preface to A Frenchman's Walk through Irelandfrom 1796-7, the author, a royalist army officer from Brittany named De Latocnaye, describes the rather uninspired motive to his journey. "Several suggested I should go to Ireland and write a book about my travels in that country. I had nothing to do . . ." His account belongs partially to that now well-trodden genre of Irish travel literature best described as colourful encounters with those "divils", the Irish.
Arriving by boat in Waterford, he heads to Gorum – a place he calls a miserable little village – to catch the Cork post to Dublin. Finding the coach full, he is forced to hire a “man and car” instead. “My man,” he complains, “stopped at every public house to drink or talk, leaving me in the middle of the road exposed to the rain.” After doling out a severe tongue-lashing laced with insults he’d learned on London’s docks, De Latocnaye claims to have had no more trouble with his “charioteer”. Still, he says, his proximity to the tail end of the horse puts him in such bad humour that he vows never to expose himself to such discomfort again. This marks the beginning of a string of misery encompassing bedbugs and drunkards, cagey priests and derisive locals, leading one to ask whether the book tells us more about the Irish or the particular Frenchman in their midst?
Compared to De Latocnaye's earthy tales of Ireland on the eve of the 1798 revolution, Philip Luckombe's guidebook from 1788, The Compleat Irish Traveller, strikes a more sober tone. Ken Bergin, special collections librarian at the Glucksman, described the book to me as an 18th century equivalent of the Rough Guide, written for travelling classes of the time – English gentry coming to visit their relations in Ireland.
Luckombe sets out from Dublin on a journey to Cork and Killarney, stopping briefly to admire “one of those round towers for which Ireland is remarkable. My description of this one in Clondalkin will, with little variation, serve for all of them.” In other words, having seen one round tower, you’ve seen them all, a sentiment with which I’m inclined to agree. Intriguingly though, Luckombe doesn’t feel the same way about courthouses, custom houses, citadels, fortifications, quays and harbours.
Be it Youghal, Cork, or “Kingsale”, he seems besotted with commercial activity and the workings of state and administrative power, spicing his account with an occasional aside on local political and religious temperament. Of Bandon he writes, “I was told they had formerly placed at the entrance to this town the following lines: ‘Jew, Turk or Atheist may enter here, but not a papist’.” With that he seems to be saying 18th century Bandon was still worth a visit, although the standards appear to be slipping.
“This is what most travel literature consists of,” Ken Bergin explained, “personal impressions, anecdotes, recommendations, descriptions, and hearsay.” These stories and narratives – the product of the writer’s own background and the experience of the social conditions of Ireland at a specific time – provide us with an additional access point to our past. Staff at the Glucksman Library view the acquisition of the Mc Anally Collection as the creation of a new laboratory for humanities research.
What one discovers in it will depend on the angle of approach.
Jim Deegan, director of the National Centre for Tourism Policy Studies at UL, imagines the research taking many directions, from aiding tourism academics, historians, geographers, literary and social scientists to informing future tourism policy and the development of new tourism products. “We don’t even yet fully know the true depth of material in the collection. Ciarán Mc Anally knew the importance of tourism as a social form and he had a profound knowledge of Ireland and its past. The potential is tremendous; we just need the financial resources to unlock it.”
ONE AREA OF study the collection is likely to impact on will be the perennial question of Irish identity. Even if the materials don’t shed any substantial new light on what constitutes identity, or whether it indeed even exists as anything more than a theory, the pure entertainment factor of travel writers grappling with definitions of national and regional character is alone worth the reading.
Ulster for a Better Holiday,a travel brochure published in 1938 by the Ulster Tourist Development Association, uses a quote from a Dr Murray to explain why Ireland's northeast had apparently produced "men in the front rank out of all proportion to her numbers". According to Murray, "many strains find conflux in the Belfast character; Irish, Scottish, French, Huguenot, German. All have fused, evolving a distinct type, sturdy, pushful, and above all, determined. Impossible is not in their lexicon."
In Peeps at Ireland– one in a series of children's books on the countries of the world – Katherine Tynan describes her many attempts to explain the Irish to English friends and neighbours. "I have been pulled up short as many times by the reflection that all I have been saying was contradicted by some other aspect of my country people for we are an eternally contradictory people. The Englishman is simple, the Irish complex. The Anglo-Irish have grafted on to them the complexity of the Irish without their pliability. It makes perhaps the most puzzling of all mixtures."
The Mc Anally Collection promises to be an adventurous Irish journey in its own right.