Can it really be true that coach-drivers are planning to boycott hotels in Dublin because they are threatened with being towed away? If so, it is the best news we have had in a long time. This seems to be the most perfect solution to the greatest threat faced by the Irish people: the tourist problem. No doubt there was a time when tourism could be justified - it brought money to beautiful but remote places, and it also produced a certain amount of colour and vitality and vibrant young blonde Scandinavians with whom to do various things such as oh, I don't know.
Tourism was a gentle business in those days, delicate and enquiring. The tourists who came to Ireland wanted to angle, or walk, or examine the cornucopia of old churches and ruined castles. They were, typically, of a higher quality than the sort of tourists who flocked to the resorts along the Mediterranean, there to lie on polluted beaches and attempt to get interesting varieties of skin cancer by day and venereal contagions by night. There was nothing of interest to such people in Ireland, which was a poor and backward country where people talked to you on buses and old women wore black and grocery stores were decorated with shrivelled flitches of ancient bacon which looked like head-hunters' trophies, where churches were crowded on Sunday morning and you could walk the length and breadth of the poorest parts of the capital and no harm, none at all, would ever befall you.
Bygone era
Now, of course, all that is changing. Our churches will soon be interesting archaeological relics of a bygone and superstitious era. The little grocery shop which sold bottled beer and bad cheese and ancient, sun-bleached packets of Persil from the front window, along with dead bluebottles, sausages and individual eggs is of course gone already. Most of our indigenous shopping chains have been gobbled and transformed into mirror images of British supermarkets.
It almost passes belief that Bord Failte's chief executive, John Dully, seems rather proud that something like 6 million visitors will be lured here this year, when he should have been apologising profusely and announcing initiatives to keep them away. Rather than complain, as he did, about the levels of litter in Ireland, he should be congratulating the Irish people on an enterprising way of repelling unwanted visitors. If they want clean cities, do they not come from cities where you could perform open-heart surgery on the street, and where snipers in police helicopters summarily execute litterers with single head-shots?
Grafton Street
I don't like litter; but I prefer it to having our tiny streets crammed with swaying, virtually immobile crowds of the most immutably stupid race of people in the entire world, homo visitans, gazing with bovine unseeingness at shops in Grafton Street which in every detail are identical to the ones they left behind at home. A word of advice to these people, if they are capable of understanding the syntactical complexity of what follows: go home. Do not come here.
We have had the advantage of learning from elsewhere that tourism is one of the most destructive industries in the world. It suffocates, it pollutes, it over-populates, and it reduces local culture to a few parodic icons - the Mexican hat, the little donkey, or, God help us, as any visit to Shannon airport can testify, leprechauns. (One of the disadvantages of the end of the Soviet Empire is that there will now be no nuclear war in which Shannon airport, with its abominable duty-free, would be on the list of first-strike targets. Still, I have in the longer-term great hopes for Iran.)
The lessons about what tourism can do to a place are plentiful. Police roadblocks each summer actually turn back tourist buses from Venice. Florence is a sweaty cauldron of strangers' armpit hair from May through to October, and visiting the Uffizi Gallery, one of the greatest spectacles in all of European civilisation, is like taking up residence in a Sumo-wrestler's thong.
Temple Bar
Mass tourism is an abomination, as Temple Bar, with its mobs of gawping, gormless foreigners, has discovered. Yet we hear that Dublin is to get forty new hotels this year. Far from Bord Failte encouraging more people to come here, it should be spreading reports that our capital is the home of a new and virulent form of AIDS, which is spread by eye-contact, and which causes certain and agonising death within weeks. The initial symptoms of this illness are an inclination to attack and eat children, often one's own, and this is followed by an irresistible impulse to exhibit one's gastric incontinence in public. Later, one's limbs fall off.
Bord Failte should, in classic public relations style, follow up these reports by requisitioning the residents of a cemetery and installing them in a hospital ward, where they can be examined by squads of foreign journalists who have been brought in as a means of promoting fatal Irish illnesses as being the best in the world. Not merely will an examination of the chest-cavity of a six-month old corpse kill off junket-journalism once and for all, but it might finally kill the Irish tourist business once and for all.
Something has to be done. It is only January, and already the capital looks as if there is a war across much of mainland Europe, the residents of which have decided to sit it out in Dublin, while executing passable imitations of profound congenital stupidity. Maybe they are not imitations. Maybe they are genuinely stupid - which probably means they will not know how to get out of here. We have a Bord Failte; but we have not got a Bord Slan Abhaile. It's high time we had.
In the meantime, I suppose, we must make do with the boycotting action of our bus drivers, fine men and women all. I wonder if the Yemeni and Algerian governments run courses on how to run a tourist industry.