Wolfhounds to witches: Ireland s most unusual tours – The Irish Times irishtimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from irishtimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Lorraine O’Dwyer
To Ireland’s €6bn tourism industry, however, they are the glue that binds itineraries together, the meeters-and-greeters, storytellers, fixers and friendly faces of a country so many visit for its céad míle fáilte.
They work mostly with overseas visitors (members of ATGI, the Approved Tourist Guides of Ireland, speak 21 languages from Arabic to Slovak). But in spring of this year, the whole sector went up in smoke. “I was like a barometer in a way,” says Suzanne Burns of Kinsale Food Tours (
kinsalefoodtours.ie). “I link into so many businesses in the town; if I get cancelled it affects others too. I had something like 200 bookings by the time February rolled in, but then I started getting mass cancellations.”