Dublin: 100% Irish

Wild Wicklow Tour guides are "100% Irish", according to their brochure. This had nothing to do with my choice to choose them, but in hindsight perhaps it should have been enough to turn me away. In doing so I could have made a principled stand against discrimination (non-Irish need not apply) and against pandering to the childish expectations of adults. Instead I booked one of their bus tours through the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin. Figured it would be stupid to a let little thing like that keep me from the Irish countryside.

I got an Irishman as promised, only my Irishman didn't tell charming stories or dance jigs. My Irishman was a tired, weathered, old man who'd been doing this way too long. I kinda felt bad for the guy (He wasn't well either; he kept on turning his microphone off to protect our ears from his hacking cough.) The real problem was that he was a lousy, uninspired guide. His schpiel sounded like the summary of the summary of somebody else's vague sparknotes. "These are the Wicklow Mountains. If you look out your left you'll see the rolling hills of Ireland, where Irish people have lived for generations. Generations have farmed here, raised their families here and been buried here. My own pa' (he laid it on when he wanted to) was born in the town right there in the valley, which is also where Braveheart was filmed." I did not know this, but apparently Braveheart was filmed in every valley in south-eastern Ireland.

Snaking through the peat bogs, our Irishman got to talking about the Irish potato famine. "They were hard times for Irishmen and women because there wasn't any food. Some survived, but many didn't. Some found work, but many withered away from hunger. Some left, but many were stuck here. Over 50 million Irishmen left. Another 50 million stayed. Of those, almost 60 million died or left, but many didn't. And all along the English did nothing, nothing at all to help the starving, leaving, multiplying Irishman. And Braveheart was filmed in the valley to your left."

Here's the thing. Wicklow Tours only boasts about the 100% Irish thing because they think tourists will be disappointed if they go to Ireland and get a Polish tourguide who's been living in Ireland for four years, no matter how knowledgeable and energetic he or she is. The problem is Ireland, and especially Dublin, is not the "Irish" country tourists are expecting; I'd say half the people I interacted with--shopkeepers, waiters, museum guides, etc.--where foreign born. I stayed at a hostel in the Chinese section of town, ate Chinese every night, read Irish-Russian papers. So who's gotta give? The tourism industry (by tearing down fanciful images) or the tourists? It's got to be the latter, right (tourism has to make money), but then what do you do about the discrimination of a thing like '100% Irish?' How do you try to integrate foreigners into a culture, then sell the country to tourists as though you were ashamed of them? (Come to think of it, as far as the US is imagined as a nation of immigrants it may avoid this more than any other country.)

It looks like this question is going to be even more relevant when the Republic of Ireland rolls out its new publicity campaign "Ireland: an island of unique character and characters" (visitors were reported let down by the old promise of pristine natural environments). An "Irish character" is the guy I thought my tour guide would be, right? Red hair, freckles, Guinness in one hand, pot of gold in the other? So the problem persists.