Opinion

Telling tourists about the real, hidden Ireland

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

Patrick Murphy
Patrick Murphy Patrick Murphy

Where should we direct tourists who want to see Ireland? No, not the Ireland of the Giant's Causeway and Killarney's lakes. The real Ireland - the one in which we live and which we try to hide from visitors. Where can tourists find the hidden Ireland?

Maybe they could start with a tour of some historic Irish buildings. Perhaps a visit to the 700 ghost estates of half-built houses, monuments to modern Irish folly? Sadly, some of these estates have been demolished, so tourists will be unable to experience the full glory of Ireland's rich heritage of economic madness.

Then they could meet the 90,000 people on the housing waiting list in the south and the 40,000 in the north. Maybe, that would take too long. Better to build an interpretive centre, showing photographs of those without decent homes and even those with no homes.

After all, we would not want cruise-ship Americans rubbing shoulders with the homeless.

Or perhaps they should begin with a tour of the thousands of bedrooms, north and south, which are empty because the young people who should sleep there are scattered across the globe.

Tour guides could relate: ``This young woman's bedroom is empty, because she works in a Sydney office. This one is empty because a young man is an illegal immigrant in New York."

Maybe another interpretative centre would be better, one in which visitors could see a reconstructed empty bedroom and a vacant chair or two at the Irish dinner table.

For balance we should show them our budding entrepreneurs who make a living at home. We could bring them by the busload to the border, where those with initiative (and the right contacts) smuggle everything from diesel to cigarettes.

Tourists could experience the hidden Ireland there, where our more creative citizens follow the example of the Apple corporation and avoid paying tax.

They could view the actual border, an erratic pattern of streams, hedges and imaginary lines bisecting mountains and loughs. Guides might explain to them how our political settlement made this fracture permanent by consent. (Now, there's an explanation worth hearing.)

Then they could visit the border's guarantors in Ireland's most costly interpretive centre -Stormont. Planned as a memorial to the 4,000 unnecessary dead, it now stands as a monument to the incompetent living.

Our visitors could marvel at Stormont's Department of Regional Development depots where lorries have enough fuel for three days a week and workers have only £50 a day to spend on tarmac - enough to cover an area the size of your living room.

Of course, any visit to the island of saints and scholars, requires reference to religion. Tourists could view Dublin's statue to Daniel O'Connell, the man who won Catholic emancipation.

We could then explain to them why we have no statues to the victims of that emancipation, such as the 796 babies whose bodies were dumped in a septic tank at the Bon Secours mother and baby home in Tuam between 1925 and 1961. We have no memorials at three similar homes, which may hold the remains of over 3,000 babies.

We could train tourist guides to explain why abortion has always been illegal in Ireland, but allowing living babies to die of neglect was perfectly legal, especially in the name of religion.

Then we could bring our visitors to the child abuse inquiry in Banbridge, followed by a tour of chapels, orphanages, car parks and fields where clerical and other abuse is unmarked by memorial, plaque or statue.

Every tourist should visit a country's capital city. Per head of population Dublin is now one of the world's leading cities for gangland killings. Maybe a visit to the murder scenes of pubs, streets and doorsteps would offer an insight into the real Ireland.

Or perhaps it would be more informative for them to accompany charities such as St Vincent de Paul to modern suburban homes in the early winter evening, where the children are in bed because their parents cannot afford heating. The children eat the food parcels and return to bed.

You see, the physical landscape merely describes what a country looks like. The human landscape explains what it actually is.

Ireland's scenery is our national wallpaper, some of it beginning to peel around the edges. In view of what the hidden Ireland contains, it might be best to just show tourists the wallpaper and send them home in ignorance.

After all, tourism is just another form of make-believe. And if we make believe things for ourselves, why should we tell the truth to tourists?