THE middle of the tourist season is as good a time as any to consider the performance of this important sector of our economy during the past decade.
By any standard it has been a successful 10 years. When this year's season ends, we will probably have received and catered for a number of visitors that will be 21/2 times greater than the figure for 1986. And although the average stay of our visitors has fallen by about 15 per cent during this period, it is offset by a similar increase in the real value of visitors' daily spending in Ireland so revenue from visitors has also risen 21/2 times. In other words, it will have jumped from £550 million in 1986 to about £1,375 million this year.
Visitors' spending adds about 4 per cent to GNP, and during the peak season visitors increase our population by about 6 per cent. This concentration remains as much a problem today as in the past two fifths of our visitors are still concentrated in the third quarter of the year.
Not all these visitors are tourists. One in seven comes here on business. Moreover, many are emigrants returning to visit their homes and relatives. Such visits are largely a function of the scale of recent emigration, especially to Britain. So while the numbers of such visitors increased by half between 1986 and 1990 they have since fallen again reflecting the cessation of net emigration during the past five years. (During this period new emigrants to Britain have been marginally exceeded by the number of those returning to work here).
The proportion of visitors accounted for by holidaying emigrants has consequently fallen from two fifths of the total in 1986-1988 to less than a quarter last year. And the proportion of tourists has risen from 35 per cent to 55 per cent, and is rising.
Towards the end of the 1980s the main tourism dynamic emanated from Europe. This was the product of successful promotions, combined with increased capacity on car ferries from France, as well as the belated appearance of continental airlines on routes to Ireland. Continental visitors increased 21/2 times between 1986 and 1991.
There was also a substantial increase in tourism from Britain during these years but by contrast there was no net increase in Americans visiting Ireland in the second half of the 1980s. And in 1991, fears aroused by the Gulf War caused the US figure to plummet.
But this was a temporary setback since 1990 North American visitors to Ireland have increased by half. And in the same period the figure for Britain has risen by a further one third and for the Continent by a quarter.
A crucial factor in the growth of tourist traffic has been the impact upon air fares of the introduction of competition in the mid 1980s. In the 1950s Aer Lingus had pioneered low fares, including promotional fares for mid week, early morning and late night flights a process in which I played a part until in 1958 I resigned from my post as research and schedules manager.
This low fare policy seems to have been maintained up to the end of the 1960s. The result was that the volume of cross channel traffic increased throughout these two decades by about 5 per cent a year, and the air share of this traffic rose from one sixth to well over a half.
THE outbreak of violence in the North at the end of the 1960s reduced the number of cross channel visitors. Although the volume of Irish originating traffic continued to increase by almost two thirds during the 1970s the resultant slow down to little more than 2 per cent a year led Aer Lingus, enjoying a dominant position on cross channel routes, to move away from its former cheap fare policy.
Traffic was then diverted to the cheaper sea ferry services. Between 1977 and 1984 the air share of cross channel traffic dropped from 49 per cent to 38 per cent and on continental routes the ferries almost doubled their share.
It is impossible to know to what extent abandoning the low fares policy, as well as diverting some half a million passengers back to the cheaper sea ferries, may have intensified the setback to tourism caused by the violence in Northern Ireland. But the negative effect must have been considerable judging by the astonishing traffic boom that followed our decision in government in the mid 1980s to authorise competition, inter alia by Ryanair.
For within four years the volume of cross channel traffic had increased by half, by far the biggest increase 70 per cent being in the number of cross channel visitors thus encouraged to come to Ireland.
Not all cross channel visitors are British. One quarter come to Ireland via Britain from Europe, from North America or else where. A disturbing development has been a sudden sharp rise in the volume of visitors coming to Ireland by this indirect route.
Thus although the number of North American visitors coming here by direct services increased by 15 per cent last year following the introduction of non stop Aer Lingus flights to and from Dublin, there was a remarkable increase of almost one half in the numbers coming from the US and Canada via Britain, thus reducing the direct service proportion from over half to under 45 per cent.
In part at least this reflects the growing marketing power of the major airlines operating from North America to London in particular. But the problem might have been much less acute had successive governments not been concerned about a single marginal Dail seat in Clare to persist with the compulsory stop at Shannon long after this policy had become counter productive.
This persistence discouraged US airlines from initiating services to Ireland and, indeed, seems to have contributed to an almost irrational prejudice amongst their against such operations.
THAT was not the only negative effect of this policy. If Aer Lingus had been free several years earlier to operate some of its transatlantic services directly to and from our capital, Dublin could have been established as a hub, serving parts of Britain through feeder operations. But by the time the policy was changed, this opportunity had been lost.
It should in fairness be added that Opposition as well as Government parties share responsibility for this debacle no political party was prepared to challenge the compulsory Shannon stop in time.
There are indications that the proportion of continental visitors to Ireland coming via Britain has also recently begun to rise. Although direct services from the Continent held firm in 1988-1994 increasing their proportion of continental visitors to Ireland from two thirds to three quarters last year one half of the increase in this traffic chose to travel via Britain.
One factor working against the growth of direct traffic has been the fact that the numbers travelling on car ferries between Ireland and France remained static between 1987 and 1994 and dropped by 7 per cent last year.
One final point. The £1.375 million that we will earn from tourism this year almost tallies with the £3.6 million that we will spend on about 2.75 million visits outside the country. Tourism just pays for our holidays outside Ireland Correction.
In last week's column on EMU the reference to a cumulative employment "loss of the order of 80,000" between 1999 and 2005 if Ireland remained outside the EMU with Britain under "tranquil" conditions should have read cumulative man year employment loss of the order of 80,000".