Oscar nominations for films like The Banshees of Inisherin or An Cailín Ciúin will lift hopes that on-screen cultural achievements will translate into more international tourists coming to visit the country.
Film locations like the Aran Islands and Achill Island should see a boost. After all it has worked before from The Quiet Man to Star Wars and the very successful marketing of the Wild Atlantic Way.
Unfortunately, the tourism sector is in a very mixed place.
The good news is that compared with 2021, last year saw a dramatic increase in visitor numbers. The bad news is that the figure marked a 73pc recovery from pre-Covid 2019 levels.
Translate that into real figures and in 2019 we had 10.8 million visits from abroad, according to CSO data. Last year it was around seven million, according to the Irish Tourism Industry Confederation.
We are reading record quarterly profits for Ryanair, but of course that relates as much to the money-making machine that is the Ryanair model, as opposed to a full recovery of tourists or anybody else arriving in Ireland.
The CSO traditionally gathered very accurate data about visitor numbers and where they were coming from.
But that collecting of information at airports and sea ports was suspended in March 2020, to protect CSO enumerators and the travelling public from Covid-19.
It appears that it hasn’t fully resumed. This means the CSO publishes data on arrivals including where the flight arrived from, as opposed to where the passenger journey began.
The industry believes we will not see a return to 2019 visitor numbers until 2026
Arrivals could be returning Irish people from holiday or someone arriving off a flight from Germany having begun their journey in Tokyo.
It is still useful, but clearly not as transparent as the old system of a survey at arrivals which has yet to be fully brought back.
The latest figures show that last year 17 million people arrived in Ireland on overseas routes, which was significantly lower that pre-Covid 2019 levels.
Full-year 2022 was still about the Covid recovery and the tourism industry should be more optimistic about 2023, but there are real challenges.
The first is about profitability and rising costs. A Fáilte Ireland survey before Christmas found that rising energy costs was the number one concern of industry operators, followed by other higher costs and the impact of a downturn on disposable income.
The industry believes we will not see a return to 2019 visitor numbers until 2026, which could make it one of the slowest sectors to return to pre-Covid levels.
Bear in mind that exporting companies in some sectors managed to export more during Covid than before it and they have kicked on right through 2022.
Other mitigating factors include the availability of hotel space, given the large number of hotel beds occupied by Ukrainians and asylum seekers through the State.
It still isn’t clear how this will play out when it comes to freeing up beds for more lucrative tourist visitors in some cases, or hoteliers sticking with short-term state contracts in others.
Luke Skywalker and recent Star Wars movies boosted tourist numbers at Skellig Michael
A tourism industry survey late last year tracked the nature of the tourism recovery after Covid and it was a mixed bag.
More than half of industry operators expected to see an increase in the number of foreign visitors on holidays this year, but one in five of them believed it was going to drop compared with 2022.
The most optimistic part of the sector was operators of attractions and activities with 58pc of them expecting business to increase this year.
The least optimistic were food and drink providers with just 26pc of them saying they expected business to increase this year.
Some of this pessimism around food and drink may be stemming from the pending Government decision to put the Vat rate back up to 13.5pc at the end of this month, from the pandemic-era 9pc.
Some hoteliers have done well after Covid, especially from Irish customers in places like Dublin.
Staycations were never going to remain at Covid levels and as soon as people could fly, they would. However, it is more striking that domestic tourism has stuck and it will remain a bigger part of the future of the industry.
More than half of tourism service providers are saying that their visitor numbers from Italy and Spain are down compared with pre-Covid,. Germany and France are similar.
There is lots of capacity on flights coming into Ireland
Even the strong US dollar hasn’t brought American visitor numbers fully back.
Quite worryingly, our biggest market, Britain, remains challenged. More than half of operators say their business from there was below pre-Covid levels last year.
Yet, when it comes to domestic holidays and trips, nearly 40pc of operators say their numbers are higher than they were in 2019.
The industry is still coming through a shock. It was quick to jack up its prices when it felt the market could bear it, in the face of higher costs. But it can’t keep doing that. You can only get away with that in a period of high inflation a couple of times. It doesn’t work after that.
The Government has provided incentives for airlines to open up new routes and by and large they have delivered on this. There is lots of capacity on flights coming into Ireland.
On the negative side, the industry is at a crossroads. It is a huge employer around the country and its value to the economy has been estimated at €6bn. This is probably less than Apple’s contribution to the economy in real money terms. But when it comes to economic activity across 32 counties of the island, its reach is greater than Apple’s.
With the industry at a critical juncture now is a good time to question what kind of tourism we want. Should we be chasing the biggest numbers coming to the island? Is that a long-term sustainable proposition?
Perhaps the old adage of getting to 11 million or even 15 million visitors is no longer the way to look at it. Wholly sustainable tourism is a fantasy until such time as planes can fly exclusively on renewable fuel.
With the domestic market likely to remain strong, there is a case for chasing higher value instead of headcount. Now is a good time to re-appraise the long-term strategy.
