Phrases like ‘Irish travel writing’ or ‘Irish tourism’ mostly evoke travel to or in Ireland. A renowned touristic destination since the eighteenth century, Ireland is typically seen a country that welcomes, rather than produces, travellers. These travellers’ writings about the country have now been extensively mapped through various studies.1 Ireland, to be sure, is also famed for those who have left and are still leaving its shores, but mostly in so far as their experiences can be discussed in terms of emigration and exile. As the financial collapse of the Celtic Tiger in 2008 gave a new impetus to the age-old tradition of emigration from Ireland, the attention that has been devoted to the Irish diaspora is unlikely to dry up.2 In an Irish context, the words ‘Ryanair generation’ are most commonly used to refer to a new type of Irish emigrants who fly back to their home country as often as possible, rather than to tourists who use cheap airfares to go on foreign holidays. The latter, however, are also an important constituency within Ireland; one aim of this book is to show that they have been travelling out of the country for longer and in greater numbers than is often recognized in a culture where emigration occupies a central place in the national consciousness, and where tourism is usually discussed as a national industry that attracts foreign customers. To speak of ‘Irish travel’ or ‘Irish tourism’ as referring to leisure trips out of (and back to) Ireland, as this study will do, is largely to go against the grain.
In so far as the Irish are at all acknowledged to travel for leisure, their participation in tourism is regarded as a recent phenomenon, corresponding to an upward turn in the fortunes of a country long associated with poverty and pre-industrial modes of social and economic organization. On the eve of the financial crisis that was to shatter the new-found prosperity of the Celtic Tiger, a Mintel report on Holidays: the Irish Abroad started with the observation that ‘[o]utbound travel was a fairly uncommon event in Ireland prior to the 1980s, particularly in the RoI, with annual holidays largely viewed as an unnecessary luxury’,3 before charting a significant rise in foreign travel in the decades that followed. Irish tourists, the report announced, were becoming ‘more willing to venture outside their own country’. The compilers’ statistics showed that less than a quarter of respondents to a survey agreed with the statement ‘I like to take holidays in my own country rather than abroad’—a percentage which is declining. Such figures, the report concluded, showed a ‘relatively new-found sense of adventure’ among Irish people with regard to their holiday destinations.4
A history of tourism out of Ireland can make us query just how new the adventurousness of the Irish tourist setting off for foreign shores really is. A notable feature of the relatively sparse discussions of Irish tourism abroad is a tendency to locate its first stirrings in a recent past. Several decades before the rise of the Celtic Tiger, an article on Irish participation in chartered inclusive tours published in Irish Geography, while bemoaning a lack of reliable indicators, was already noting a significant ‘growth in Irish holidays abroad’: this was explained by ‘increased population and urbanisation, better education, higher incomes, more leisure time, improved and relatively cheaper transport, and greater organisation and promotion within the travel industry’.5 Such developments were contrasted with a not-so-distant past: in Ireland, as others argued, ‘holidaymaking was confined to a relatively small minority of the population until the middle of this [i.e. the twentieth] century’—a minority that, before independence, was said to be made up of the ‘Anglo-Irish rural and urban élite’ rather than the middle classes. As for ‘the ordinary people, a “holiday” was an outing to a fair, a “patron”, perhaps a race meeting and a football or hurling match’.6 The fact that ‘the vast majority of people did not take holidays’ was taken to confirm the still widespread view that, until recently, Ireland ‘was not a “modern” society’.7 As participation in tourism is an index of socio-economic development that confirms a nation’s modernity, Ireland has been mostly studied as a premodern country that has long sent emigrants, rather than tourists, to other climes.
The aim of this book is not to deny that, in numerical terms, foreign tourism remained a minority pursuit among the wider population of Ireland until well into the twentieth century. We should however remember that, until paid holidays were introduced for the working classes of Britain and France in the 1930s, longer leisure trips were still socially exclusive even within the pre-eminently developed nations where modern tourism had first emerged.8 So-called modern, ‘mass’ touristic practices date back to the early nineteenth century, and effectively signalled the large-scale participation of Western middle classes in the kind of leisured foreign travel that had previously been the preserve of the aristocracy. A study of the democratization of tourism in Irish society should therefore ask when, how and to what extent the country’s middle classes joined those of developed nations in taking foreign trips. An accurate quantification of the phenomenon falls outside the scope of a cultural history such as is attempted here. But if the textual evidence it has gathered cannot, except in a few cases, provide figures that would help us gauge the prevalence of touristic behaviour within Irish society at different stages of development, it does highlight a tendency among Irish commentators to play down the historical realities of Irish tourism at the same time as they attempt to chart a supposedly ‘new’ phenomenon.
This tendency is not limited to the official reports and academic scholarship of the last decades: even before the Irish Free State achieved formal independence in 1922, journalists had already noted a remarkable rise in Irish people travelling for leisure—thus both foreshadowing and qualifying more recent diagnoses of a ‘new’ Irish participation in foreign tourism. In 1914, Ireland was found to have ‘shared in the remarkable development of the tourist traffic that has taken place in the last decade’, bringing ‘what was described as the Grand Tour, available only to the wealthy, well within the means of folk whose holiday grounds were severely limited thirty of forty years ago’.9 In 1912, a columnist for the Irish Independent commented that
Writing a couple of years earlier, an article in the same newspaper recorded how ‘a couple of generations ago travel in Ireland was very limited and local in its character’, before announcing that ‘all this is changed in the main, and we have learned, and are learning, more and more, and day after day the advantages of travel’.11 Two weeks before that, another commentator had reminisced about ‘the [eighteen] sixties and early seventies, when English and Continental holidays were undreamt of except by the landlord class’.12 While such texts describe tourism as a practice rooted in Irish society, they also imply that, in a recent past, travelling for leisure, and certainly travelling abroad, had been the exclusive pursuit of the landowning Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Yet, as this book will show, a form of ‘mass’ middle-class tourism had already developed in Ireland by the 1860s. The history of modern tourism out of Ireland has so far been a series of suppressions and forgettings.Irish people of recent years have entered into the holiday spirit as they never did before, and nowadays it is the rule rather than the exception to find Irish tourists—from remote rural districts, too—penetrating into regions home and continental that were only a name to a past generation.10
The elision of Irish tourists from the national narrative is deeply entrenched in Irish culture, and foreign observers are perhaps best placed to remark upon it. In the 1990s, as the Celtic Tiger was about to roar, French sociologist Michel Peillon conducted a survey on Irish people’s attitudes towards holidays. The results showed that Irish people ‘understate their actual participation in holidaymaking’. This, Peillon concluded
A history of tourism out of Ireland can indeed have profound implications for the much-debated question of Ireland’s relative modernity,14 as tourism is widely seen as ‘an exemplary cultural practice in modern liberal democracies’.15 Among those who have called for more attention to the experiences of Irish tourists abroad, Michael Cronin has stressed the importance of such a focus for an understanding of contemporary, ‘modern’ Ireland’s place in a globalized world. Warning against an exclusive emphasis on migration studies, he writes:suggests the weak cultural basis of modernity itself and of the modern life-style practised: they have not been able to appropriate fully, in cultural terms, their actual patterns of behaviour … The strong anti-modernist leaning which pervades Irish culture makes it difficult to acknowledge a practice deeply rooted in the modernity of Ireland.13
While Cronin rightly calls for more attention to travel writing from Ireland in the twentieth century, this book takes the view that the study of touristic travel out of Ireland should begin with the nineteenth century: as it will demonstrate at length, the Irish middle classes were not slow to avail themselves of a new freedom, new wealth and new modes of transport to explore the European continent.The permanent move to Canada but not the sojourn in Sicily, the emigrants’ letters home from Australia but not the visit to Berlin, become objects of critical inquiry. Irrevocability risks becoming a talisman of authenticity (real travel [exile] v. superficial travel [tourism]) and concentration on the Irish in New Communities may narrow the world to encounters with varieties of Anglophone Irishness and neglect individual Irish experiences of a multilingual and multicultural planet.16
The travel books, newspaper articles, reviews and advertisements that will be discussed in these pages all suggest that, in the decades that followed Catholic Emancipation in 1829, tourism started taking hold as a cultural practice beyond the confines of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, whose notorious absenteeism was itself tied to the importance of foreign travel among the leisured classes of Western Europe. By becoming tourists, the often (but not exclusively) Catholic rising middle classes of Ireland translated their upward social mobility into a form of geographical mobility that confirmed their attainment of a higher social and cultural status—as James Buzard has noted, the travel writing that accompanied new forms of tourism in the nineteenth century tried to codify continental travel as a form of acculturation.17 An analysis of Irish tourism on the continent before independence will thus complement recent studies that have sought to recover the experiences of those relatively affluent Irish middle classes; a group who were often forgotten in the nationalist narrative, which looked back on Victorian Ireland through the prism of conflicts that pitted a newly mobilized peasantry against the landlord class, or through a Yeatsian lens that was hostile to middle-class culture.
As a historiographic enterprise, the recovery of those experiences is fraught with ideological implications. As Senia Pašeta points out in her discussion of the late-Victorian Catholic upper middle classes,
While the view of nineteenth-century Ireland as an essentially premodern colony has long been dominant, the consensus has been challenged by studies that have highlighted the development of a modern middle-class culture in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland. Pašeta’s Before the Revolution has been followed by studies like Stephanie Rains’s Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin, 1850–1916 and John Strachan and Claire Nally’s Advertising, Literature and Print Culture in Ireland, 1891–1922. 19 If it brings out the broadly modern nature of pre-independence Irish middle-class experiences, such work is also attentive to elements within that culture that resisted modernity, notably through its meshing with an Irish nationalist discourse that was increasingly anti-modern and suppressed the very existence of nineteenth-century middle-class Ireland after independence. The present study will in many ways return to that paradox: while charting the modern experience of tourism among the rising middle classes of post-Emancipation Ireland, this book will also draw attention to anti-modern elements in the writing that sought to educate Irish tourists into proper ways of travelling. Even as Irish middle-class subjects engaged in the consummately modern ex...[t]he failure of this élite to assume important roles in the administration of twentieth-century Ireland has ensured that their experiences and assumptions have all but disappeared; they have become ‘lost’ through momentous political change and through the subsequent construction of modern Irish history.18