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Insider View - How do you satisfy a part-time vegetarian?

Hilton Park - Clones County Monaghan Ireland

In the first of a new monthly column written refreshingly (and sometimes controversially) from the perspective of those who offer hospitality rather than enjoy it – in her case, in a wonderful 18th century mansion, Hilton Park, in County Monaghan – LUCY MADDEN ponders one of the great culinary questions posed to modern restaurateurs: how do you satisfy a part-time vegetarian?

“I forgot to tell you. My wife is a vegetarian.” It’s eight o’clock, and we are on our way into dinner— a carnivorous affair. This is a five-course set dinner and everyone had been previously warned. “She is a fish-eating vegetarian,” the guest says, sensing our dismay. The news is relayed down to the kitchen. After a moment’s silence, a voice from below replies, “What about the poor fish?”

There are vegetarians and there are people who call themselves vegetarians, but are plainly not. You can’t be a vegetarian yet eat dead animals with beaks and wings or dorsal fins. You can’t be a vegetarian yet make an exception for ham. Over the years, the strangest interpretations of the word have come our way. “I don’t eat anything that once had a face,” or “I can eat anything as long as it never drank its mother’s milk.”

My sister, who lives in Italy, where a vegetarian of any sort is still a rarity, thinks that those of this inclination are just “attention seekers”. She recently wrote to an etiquette guru in a well-known publication to ask whether or not vegetarians should announce their dietary preferences in advance of a dinner invitation. The reply was unequivocal: do not— it is a gross impertinence to imply to a hostess that you need a special dish, or so the reply went. In a commercial situation, it’s different, of course, and vegetarians have to be accommodated, albeit that you would like to put them out of their misery with a bacon sandwich.

I have observed, over the years, that some of the most committed vegetarians transmogrify into the most ferocious carnivores. The satisfaction that gives to this household of flesh-consuming individuals is similar to the pleasure felt by a group of alcoholics persuading a teetotaller to have a drink. But I’m beginning to wonder: who are the fools here?

Recently, a guest stayed who, we had been warned, ate nothing but “salads and other vegetables” How could you survive on this diet, we wondered over our pork chops? Yet, on arrival, it was clear her survival wasn’t in doubt. A more healthy human specimen has never crossed our threshold. If she had been an animal, she would have won the overall prize at the pet show.

It set me thinking, have we carnivores got it horribly wrong? The strongest animals survive on vegetation alone, so why not can’t we? Life insurers are offering special rates to vegetarians— maybe we should do the same. Working in hospitality gives you a good vantage point from which to observe the human race, the better - off ones, at any rate.

Providing food for strangers from different parts of the world throws up an opportunity for some unscientific speculation about diet. The connection between nutrition and health, that indisputably close alliance ignored by most of the medical profession, is plain to see in public dining rooms. My observation is this: quite simply, the further east in the world that is your country of origin, the more likely it is that you will not be overweight, that your hair will shine, and your teeth will be your own. You will probably be better looking all ‘round.

Several years ago, on the edges of Death Valley in California, I went into a Wal-Mart superstore and thought I was hallucinating. There were people shopping who were fatter than I had ever thought possible. There were people whose fat had nowhere else to go but was piling up on the back of their heads. Nobody of such extreme body weight could make it over the Atlantic, but plenty of others of gross girth do, and many of them come here.

We are all at it, too, myself included, getting fatter. Stand in a shopping centre and almost everyone you see is overweight. It can’t be genetic, no-one was like that when I was young, so the only conclusion you can draw is that, lack of exercise apart, we just eat too much of the wrong things. Those of us enthralled with the Western diet are, let’s face it, not great specimens of human beauty.

My late father-in-law, no slim Jim himself, liked to say, “The thin buggers die, too” which, of course, is true, but my observation is that the fat ones tend to go first. Returning guests who guzzle and gorge, indifferent to their widening girths (and never vegetarian), rarely reappear older than their late sixties.

Conversely, I was struck by the dignity and beauty of the (stick-thin) and very old people recently interviewed on television about their memories of Indian Independence. Anyone for some spinach patties and a green salad?

Together with her husband Johnny, Lucy Madden runs their magnificent 18th century mansion, Hilton Park, Clones, Co Monaghan as a country house which is open to private guests, groups, small weddings and conferences. The restored formal gardens are also open by arrangement. Lucy is a keen organic gardener and also a member of the Irish Food Writers Guild.

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View

A younger friend told me recently that I was totally out of touch with current trends and had no idea at all what people want. Me, old fashioned? Fiddle-de-dee.

Her observation was based on remarks previously made by myself about certain establishments that have been refurbished and, in my opinion, rendered hideous and out of character with the original buildings. The word ‘funky’ is often to be heard on my friend’s lips. She may of course be right in what she thinks about what her contemporaries admire, but I have ears and I use them. Many people from overseas are dismayed by what they find here because the reality is very different from the expectation, and the gap is widening.

The Lonely Planet Guide recently found the British to be a nation of beer swilling, soap opera and celebrity obsessives who talk about little else but football and the weather. What was expected? Bowler hats and cricket on the green? I may not understand funky but I do know what visitors expect here and it is very often not what they find. The dreamy landscapes still exist but on the whole not in the parts tourists are directed to. Take Leitrim for example, and Fermanagh, parts of Cavan; you can still drift off there into the rural idyll that is sold abroad. However, visitors from overseas are more likely to find themselves having the kind of experience a family from Australia told us about recently.

They had come to Ireland to marry their son to an Irish girl. They chose to stay in a newly converted mansion house that promised “a tranquil haven in unspoiled lakelands.” What they found, to their dismay, was a once lovely building that had sprouted ugly protuberances set in a landscape that resembled, as they described it, “an airport”. Yes, it is the kind of place you would go to find funkiness but in this case I know they would have liked to have their holiday destination more accurately represented before they set out. “It wasn’t what I expected” was the phrase most often repeated. They hadn’t come for the golf course or the spa, they had come because they had been sold a dream of ancient woods. Here is the rub, you can exceed expectations but can you overcome disappointment?

Curiously, I think you can and it happened to our new acquaintances from Oz. They were won over and this is how it happened. Their first impression of this country was shock at the inappropriate development that met their eyes. Then they were shocked at the cost of everything. By the time the day of the wedding arrived they seemed to close in amongst themselves and the impression was that their experience in our country was not a very positive one. But then the wedding guests arrived, bottles were opened, a ceile band struck up and platters of food appeared. Merriment was in the air. You could say that there are weddings like this all over the world, but I’ve never seen demonstrated so well Ireland’s USP – and that is the friendliness of its people.

It’s this that I would guess is most associated abroad in other people’s perception of the Irish. People will say it’s being lost, but when you find it, it’s overwhelming. There can be few other nations on earth whose citizens are more practiced in the art of congeniality. Ireland must, too, be one of the most egalitarian nations in Europe. The wedding guests came from a wide social mix, and different places, very few of them had met before and yet, as someone remarked “You would think we were all old friends.”

I watched the Australian family as the evening progressed and they dispersed through the marquee like people coming out of a cave into the sunshine. They were seduced by the jollity, the conversations, the fun. It was dawn when the party ended and at breakfast the next morning the family were as people reborn.

It seems to me that everywhere you go around Ireland there are people whose language and observations about the world are quite unique. In the most unlikely places you can find a humour and lightness of delivery in the way strangers will speak to you that you just don’t find in other countries. And growing up, as I did, in the straitjacket of class-conscious England, the levelling effect of the friendliness here, is all the more marked.

As the mother of the groom left for the airport, through tear-filled eyes she said goodbye. “We’ll remember this for the rest of our lives” she said, and she didn’t mean the high prices paid, or the disappointment of not finding the ancient woods.

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - When is a tip not a tip?

My sister-in-law, who has uncompromising views of etiquette, keeps a visitors book in her house. Nothing odd about this, except that I noticed on the back page a list, written in her hand, of some of the names of her guests. I asked her what the people listed had in common and, reluctantly, she confessed that they were those who had not left a tip on departure. Her indignation with them was evident and this is a little strange because her ‘staff’ consists of one octogenarian collected an afternoon every week, given a cup of tea and a biscuit, and driven home again. More of a charity case than an employee.

This obsession with tipping recently became topical due to the campaign by UNITE, the largest union in the UK and Ireland, against the practice of employers using tips to supplement the minimum wage. This is a disgraceful carry-on but one that is widespread, even in country houses. In a friend’s house, my husband watched as his host went round the bedrooms scooping up tips left by departed guests. “It goes towards the wages” was the explanation from this well-heeled individual.

Tips, however, are not part of the pay packet and this habit is exploitation. Not everyone agrees with this. My own sister thinks that all tipping should be abolished and everyone should be paid a fair wage. Why, too, do we tip taxi drivers, hair dressers and waiters but not the bus driver or the person working in the dry cleaners?

About 30% of our guests leave tips. These are pooled and divided among the staff since it seems unfair that only those on show should benefit. The most generous tippers are the Irish, and the meanest are the Americans. This is particularly irritating since in the United States you aren’t allowed out of a hostelry without leaving a tip. In a restaurant in LA, after a grindingly slow wait for a plate of indifferent pasta, we were told that our gratuity of 12.5% was not enough and the owner barred the door until we paid him 20%. Yet Americans in Ireland scrutinise bills like no others and ask for change in cents.

In The Man Who Ate Everything restaurant critic Jeffrey Steingarten talks about the school for waiters in New York that suggested the students added the words “For You” (as in “What can I get For You?) when dealing with customers. Apparently by adding these words their tips were doubled so don’t tell me that tipping is not de rigeur across the pond.

Naturally, service charges inhibit people from tipping. UNITE urges customers to ask restaurateurs where the money is going. As a tipper, I strive not to offend. This can go wrong: my daughter and I arrived at a hotel in Prague where our luggage was carried up to the bedroom with Ruritanian pomp. As we were not familiar with the Czech currency I scooped some coins out of a purse and with a “There you are my man” kind of munificence pressed these into his hand. We later discovered that I had given him the equivalent of a couple of cents and for the rest of our stay we slunk around trying to avoid him. The daughter, who worked in Dublin restaurants before the introduction of the euro, singled out the French for a deliberate misunderstanding of the punt when tipping with a handful of cents.

In a world that is becoming stamped with a dreadful uniformity, the idea that something as personal, even idiosyncratic, as tipping, should be standardised or eradicated, strikes me as a shame. The possible ubiquity of the service charge could have this effect. Recently in our area we have lost to outside pressures our post office, our fish shop, our local deli, a pub or two and the best clothes shop. You may wonder what this has to do with tipping, and on the surface very little, but it is all part of the slow eradication of choice.

We are losing a way of life that has taken centuries to evolve; vernacular architecture, local cultures, differences in land use, all these make places unique and interesting and they are being lost under a tide of uniformity. Our town centres are dominated by the supermarket giants, countryside is lost to car parks, the relentless march of the retail chains sweeps away all before them. We can’t do much about it, but we can reserve the right to reward good service with the proffering of a note or two straight into the hands of those who worked for it.

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - Tourist Board Approval - Does It Matter?

Lucy Madden recalls a busman's holiday to Edinburgh, winding up in the B&B from hell, and begins to understand just why we should be grateful for the exceptionally high levels of inspection by the Irish Tourist Board (Fáilte Ireland).

“My you are popular," my daughter once said, looking at our kitchen calendar for the coming month. There was a single entry for the 30 days and it read "renew TV licence". "We're far too busy for a social life," I said defensively, stuffing the redundant calendar out of sight. The truth is, we have slipped irretrievably through the social net, and thank heavens for it.

If you work in hospitality, you want to spend your free time as far from it as possible. This may involve some solitary occupation such as long-distance running or, in our case, feet up and eating baked beans in front of Coronation Street. Dinner parties are what other people go to.

There are exceptions, however; some time ago an invitation to Edinburgh came our way for reasons of a marriage, and although this meant three days of intense socialising, it also meant a chance to check out the opposition. You might assume that this is a preoccupation of people in various walks of life, but I've noticed it's not always so. Hotelier friends go on self-catering holidays.

I know people who work in the film industry who never go to the cinema, and writers who don't read their contemporaries' books. My theory to explain this is that we may find it somehow safer to work in isolation, less perturbing. The fear of finding oneself inadequate by comparison with one's peers is a potent reason to keep the head down.

This ignorance of the prevailing standards may be an explanation for the existence of a certain bed and breakfast business in the centre of Edinburgh. The weekend we wanted to visit the city, a rugby match was scheduled. The hotels were all booked, the guest houses were gone too.

Frantically we scanned the internet until we found a website that revealed bed and breakfast premises that still had vacancies, and so booked into one. It was walking distance from Princes Street, and the photographs of the premises revealed nothing to cause dismay.

Dismay, though, was the prevailing emotion as the taxi left us and we heaved suitcases heavy with wedding clothes down area steps, past the debris of a garden makeover and into the dark basement that would be our home for the next four nights. So small was the double bedroom that the bed was pushed up against one wall, denying access for one sleeper.

It was covered with a purplish nylon cover that looked as if your fingers would stick to it if touched. There was one chair, no table, on the mantelpiece a few dead branches stood in a vase of brown, stagnant water. In our daughter's single room, a stale pubescent whiff hung in the air, and a look in the cupboards revealed why.

The shelves were piled with the debris of an absent teenager; among the shoes and discarded detritus there was no room for a visitor's clothes. The bed was rumpled and a hair decorated the soap. Fond thoughts of home overcame us. "I'll have to have several large whiskies and wear a blind-fold before I get into that bed," the daughter said, echoing our thoughts.

Now this is an establishment that charges in the region of £135 a night for a room. During our visit, the owner was absent, practising yoga in India we were told, and she had installed a well-meaning but bewildered friend to run her business. She agreed to clear away some of the smellier shoes from the cupboard and after two days hoovered up the trail of dust exposed when we moved our bed from the wall, but nothing could allay our sense of grievance.

This was student accommodation at hotel prices. "No-one else has ever complained," we were told, but why the hell not? Further up the road, and for the same price, there was a hotel with fresh flowers, a bright receptionist and a clean lobby but, inevitably, they were booked up for months ahead.

Remembering the inspections we have had down the years from our own tourist board, they suddenly began to make even more sense. We weren't surprised to find that our basement abode had not been passed by the Scottish tourist board. No scrutiny of those beds could have passed inspection. All we could do was to register dissatisfaction with the website that advertised the premises and remember in future only to stay in registered places.

Elsewhere in the Scottish capital things were more cheery. What a great city to visit: so much to see. You can eat well, too. Down in the dockland area of Leith, we ate two 'light' courses of the finest seafood imaginable served with a glass of wine for £10. The place was packed. If only we had a string of such places around our own coastland. There are more simple, cost-conscious places coming on stream in these straitened times, certainly, especially in cities - but prices tend to go up alarmingly in areas where there is less competition.

We are told that the bed and breakfast sector in Ireland is struggling to survive. The old adage that you are only as strong as your weakest link may be part of the explanation. I never thought I'd say it, but greater scrutiny may be part of the answer.

[NB: Only ITB Approved Accommodation is considered for recommendation by Georgina Campbell Guides.]

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - Busman's Holiday

There is a handwritten card of the utmost sadness pinned up in our local shop, and it reads: 'Polish woman desperate to work. Will do anything.' Whoever would have thought even a year ago that things would have come to this, and so quickly?

I thought of these words looking round the room at the recent AGM of the Hidden Ireland, at Temple House in Sligo. We providers of accommodation in historic private houses were gathered at one of our own, a premises that defines spaciousness, with six of the largest bedrooms in the country, and there wasn't a whiff of desperation in the air.

Some of this might have been due to the exhortations of Leanne, a marketing lady of infectious enthusiasm who reminded us of the reasons to be cheerful. "Come on, guys," she called, fist in the air. "If nobody is going abroad, everyone will holiday at home. There are still plenty of people out there with money. Go forth and welcome them into your homes." No need for assisted suicide here, obviously.

The problem with receiving paying guests in the establishment that you and your loved ones call home is that it does not predispose you to repeat the experience when on holiday. Instead one yearns for the anonymity of large hotels, in particular those of the international chain variety. The wish to savour the indifference of rooms numbered in hundreds can be seductive. Or so I thought.

Then, urged on by the good reports of others, we booked in for a night at The Blue Book's Coopershill House, in Sligo, a family-run business of some years, presently hosted by the affable Simon O'Hara, he for whom nothing seems too much trouble.

Our evening in this beautiful house had, as it turned out, an Agatha Christie-without-the-murders feel about it. An after-dinner coffee in front of the fire and conversation with two Miss Marple lookalikes, a dashing young couple and an enigmatic pair of hand-holding middle-aged Americans, straight from the pages of Henry James, left us wondering why we had ever found charm in larger establishments. Today is all about reconnecting, as Leanne had told us, the need to revive human contact. And if this is the Zeitgeist, can we, whose properties can offer these individual and unique experiences, be blamed for feeling just a wee bit smug?

Leanne had asked us to identify and list our USPs but instead my mind, rarely anxious to do as it is bid, meandered back over the years of staying in hotels with the attendant question: what makes an establishment memorable? Bathrooms do it for me. In particular I think of a high-ceilinged and marble-floored one in Mysore, India, with its scent of sandalwood and polished furniture. It seemed so redolent of the Raj, as I imagined it.

Much of the charm of hotels for this simple mind is about association, whether it is with other times or events or those who have stayed there before. I want to eat chocolate cake again at the Pera Palas in Istanbul or meander around the wide white corridors of the hotel in Luxor - both hotels where the aforementioned crime writer stayed when she wrote Death on the Nile - or visit again the Maison Arabe in Marrakech, where allegedly the 9/11 attack was conceived, and where an atmosphere of secrecy is so rigidly enforced that you feel that the dress code must be a burka.

I'd love to go back to the aptly named Magic Hotel in Hollywood, where the rooms all reek of Shake 'n' Vac, but the swimming pool is lit not just by the night sky, but from floodlights that swoop over the city. It has all the sleazy seductiveness of a B-list movie, and you can be a part of it.

But it's holidays at home this year, so take me back to Ballynahinch Castle to sit at the bar and feel that Ireland is still a place of extraordinary warmth and character, or look out at the Atlantic from one of Paddy Foyle's eclectic bedrooms at The Quay House in Galway, or play on the sands after breakfast at Kelly's in Wexford, or maybe gorge on oysters at Sheen Falls Hotel, or doze on the lough beside Enniscoe House in the shadow of Nephin, or have an oily soak in a seaweed bath. It's all so characterful and imbued with the possibilities of chance encounters awaiting in this watery paradise.

Come on, guys, why risk the perils of air travel and pandemics? Stay at home and spend what little you have on a short break in your own country. Then perhaps this season won't be so bad and perhaps one of us may even be able to offer work to a desperate Pole.

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - Cultural Tourism

Remember the couple who were spotted ‘fornicating’ on a beach in Dubai? They got off lightly, I reckon. Three months in the slammer seems lenient; in other places, it could have been death by stoning or decapitation, or worse. It only goes to show how horribly we Westerners behave as soon as the seat-belt sign is switched off at foreign airports. Then the hordes of overweight, tattooed, inappropriately dressed individuals spill out onto foreign soil. It’s all so embarrassing.

It’s dangerous, too. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, by behaving badly, being indifferent to the sensibilities of the host nations, we encourage in them feelings of antagonism and radicalism.

We expose our hideous bodies on beaches in countries where women are modest and cover heads and arms. We grumble in loud voices and ask for chips and get drunk and, all in all, what a spectacle we make of ourselves when abroad. And I can say this because I have English blood: the English are the worst offenders.

By contrast, it seems to me that visitors to this country are, on the whole, a most pleasant lot. This may be because so many of them are coming here to discover their roots and have a certain respect for the place before arrival. Temple Bar and environs apart, visitors are not arriving in this country to rampage or flaunt their flesh or drink until they drop. Who could afford that here?

Our own experience is that the independent traveller in Ireland is largely attracted by the history and culture, as well as our perceived friendliness. As such, these persons are likely to be less of a hedonistic bent. They are curious. They don’t move in battalions. Apart from the occasional American who travels the world in search of a power shower, people arriving here are unfailingly polite and seek to appreciate what they find.

I can’t imagine, and don’t want to, the disdain that, say, the Spanish, or the Egyptians, or the Moroccans must feel at the unruly hordes of Northern Europeans moving through their territories. There’s something to be said for having a bad climate and no cheap booze.

Last year, I spent a week in Croatia. There are many similarities between our two countries – small populations, long coastlines, beautiful landscapes and the shared experience of a recent and bloody civil war.

Tourism is important to both economies, and clearly our two countries have received bountiful aid to rebuild shattered infrastructures. If you were assessing the merits and demerits of a country as a tourist destination, Croatia would score well.

It struck us as the cleanest country we had ever visited. The smallest hostelry had starched tablecloths and sparkling cutlery. There was fresh seafood in abundance, cooked without fuss and served with vegetables often growing in view of the dining room. There wasn’t a foam, an amuse-bouche or a swirly garnish in sight.

The sun shone and everywhere we were left with the impression of a country proud of its achievements. The reconstruction of Croatia, to this beady eye, seems to have been crafted very cleverly with rampant development kept under control. “What a lovely country,” we kept saying. Our doubts about our native visitor attractions were reinforced. Why would anyone want to come to Ireland?

“How many famous Croatians can you name?” my companion asked. A long silence. No person came to mind. Then we started to remember the long list of Irish men and women whose names would be known around the world and the contribution, especially to literature, that this tiny little island has made to the arts.

Minister Martin Cullen recently identified in Hospitality Ireland magazine the importance of cultural tourism. We have it here in spades. Our literary heritage alone should provide enough material to attract people to all parts of this country, and those likely to be attracted exclude, thankfully, the marauding hordes and public fornicators. Boring old sunshine all summer – who needs it?

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - Green Tourism

The other day found me eating a large meringue before going to lie on my bed, as you do when overwhelmed by a large work-load. Yes, business is very slow: this country has so many bedrooms now. For premises with a large staff to maintain, it must be tough. For those like us who rely on, and now can’t afford, ancillary staff, the work still has to be done.

Never mind; there’s a lot of positivity round here. In our local town of Clones, once referred to in the most disparaging terms by Gay Byrne, a new state-of-the-art library opened last year, a sports complex has recently been built and the rebirth of the Ulster Canal has been announced. It’s all part of a regeneration of a long neglected area of the border.

The film maker Neil Jordan once said that he measured everything by what happened in Clones, so the rest of the country may do worse than look our way.

So how to make Clones as desirable a destination as, say, Kilkenny? One way it could be done is to capitalise on our inclusion in the Green Box area. I am a little bewildered by Green Box, with its EU Flower Awards, but applaud its aims of sustainable tourism, if there can be such a thing. Should we not all just stay at home? For the ecologically-minded there is a publication Ecoscape by Catherine Mack which, according to their website, lists places “that don’t get into the guidebooks” Why not? Is there something about them that only the cycling fraternity is going to like? Is not it possible to be green yet love luxury? The matter is very complex but has to be addressed.

I love going to one of those hotels where they have a notice in the bathroom asking you to recycle your towels and try to resist the cynical response that they are just cutting down on their laundry bills. It makes good sense to re-use towels but the issue of who is and who is not green is fraught with contradiction. Trawling an eco-tourism website I saw a photograph of a featured café in southern England and read their menu. There was an item that read “locally produced bacon and sausages” but the other dishes on offer included ham with pineapple, mozzarella cheese, capers and olives. Imagine the air miles for that lot.

Most well-intentioned people these days try to do their best for Mother Earth – where it suits them. We recycle where we can, burn our own sustainable fuels (we are lucky to own woods), use low-energy lighting, grow fruit and vegetables organically, keep pigs and sheep and poultry. But we live in a large old house that cannot be converted into environmentally friendly ways without huge expense and if we are only going to serve food that is locally grown there should be no orange juice for breakfast, no oils for cooking, no wines or spirits. Obviously our intentions are good but could do better.

Alistair Sawday’s Green Guide features a few places in Ireland that tick the right boxes, environmentally. Mostly they seem to do what we do but have reed beds and are painted with organic paint. One of them brings the wood to the house on the back of a donkey. “This is the near side of lunacy,” my husband commented. One house is commended for having a Fatstripper in the kitchen, a device that removes the fat from the washing up water. Anxious to buy one, I Googled Fatstripper but could only trace it as a weight-loss tablet, so wait to be enlightened. Worst of all is a host who, at breakfast, regales you with his environmental credentials. Pass the ear plugs, please.

I noticed, too, that one of the hosts admitted that they were not signed up members of any organic movement – “too much paperwork, too expensive” and here is the rub. We want to be green but we don’t want to submit to more inspections and payments and bureaucracy. Nor do we want the dead hand of uniformity over the land. I understand that there needs to be a link between those who do their best to deliver a green product and those who wish to avail of it, but there is another way to encourage it.

This involves building up a network of local growers, artisan food producers and craftspeople. It means spending money on training. This has been happening to good effect around the Organic Centre in Rosinver in Co. Leitrim. A good place to start in this area might be the reopening of the old country market in the Butteryard in Clones. Monaghan has some of the best farmers in the country and a thriving market has so many fringe benefits for a community. We could even ask Gay Byrne to the opening.

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - Call of the Wild

Lucy Madden muses on our affluence, or lack of it, and thinks she may have got hold of the germ of an idea which could open up a whole new tourist market in Ireland - and give back to children and teenagers some of the freedom and sense of wonder that’s been lost in recent years.

The dentists are back. Murmurings about sealers and polishers drift into the after-dinner chat. Clearly in this recession teeth are a priority, even though this strikes me as strange since it's not obvious we in this country have embraced the American love of flashing white gnashers. However, it's good news that one professional group still have money to spend on going away; we have always felt our guests to be a barometer of Irish affluence, or lack of it.

The dentists are most welcome and on the whole are perfect guests. The only drawback is the necessity of keeping one's mouth somewhat pursed so as not to reveal dental shortcomings therein. As well as the dentists, we have noted an increase in group bookings. This is generally perceived to have its roots in the economic crisis with people closing ranks and withdrawing into family units.

In our family we play a game that involves picking a person and then suggesting the occupation to which he or she would be least suited. When my husband is the subject of the game, someone always suggests Playschool Teacher. The boldest children have been known to shrink under his fierce scowl, so it was a surprise when he suggested that we should forego targeting the adult population, and promote ourselves as a destination for the young.

In an episode of The Apprentice in the UK, candidates had to rebrand the town of Margate as a tourist destination and the winning team went down the child-friendly route. But everyone knows that the English don't like children, preferring four-legged furry things. We in Ireland would be so much better at it.

Guests in this house love to suggest alternative activities for us and last year an American couple posited the idea of becoming a residential summer camp for teenagers, a concept popular in the States. We have open spaces and are some way from pubs. At first the idea appalled, with visions of retrieving vodka bottles and worse from under beds, but it did form the kernel of an idea. Here in Ireland we have everything that children love; nature, beaches, lots of waterways, we still have wilderness and the mystery of unspoiled places. Moreover, children don't mind the rain; they don't even notice it.

There is a children's' play area at the Bloom Festival in Phoenix Park that exemplifies what we are best at. Manned by a few enthusiastic and patient souls, there were skipping games and gardens to plant and an activities tent and it was somehow old-fashioned but imaginative and so exactly what children love, There wasn't an electronic gadget in sight. As a dedicated follower of festivals, I am always struck by the trouble taken in this country to provide fun for children. With our natural friendliness towards the young, coupled with our long coastline and rivers and lakes, we in Ireland still have an uncorrupted Blytonesque landscape to provide an alternative to the techno world outside. We could become the most child-friendly destination in Europe.

This is not going to appeal to everyone. Horror of kiddies is not uncommon. I had an uncle (childless) who used to say; "Never talk to a child. You'll never get rid of them." Like cats, he would say, children always go to the one who likes them least. This is a problem easily overcome by creating childfree zones. Sometimes it's the children who want to avoid the adults. Apparently there is a country hotel somewhere, where a notice asks guests not to speak to the children of the house in order to preserve their privacy. This is not in the spirit of child-friendliness. Nor is the fact that our local library, through no fault of its own but because of cuts in funding, no longer can afford to provide children with writing equipment.

A trawl through www.irelandforkids.ie did show up a number of child-friendly activities and places to stay. Mostly they are very structured. All well and good but I say children also love historic houses and the call of the wild. I have a vision of the outdoor life; cowboy dampers cooking over campfires, messing about in boats, larks on hay bales. It may mean high tea at six and wellies in the hall, a far cry from the boutique hotels so beloved of contemporary consultants, but it is feasible and there must be a huge market out there.

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - Cultural experiences - With a Difference

My son likes to remind his prurient mother that she once, when driving through Gloucester, suggested making a detour to see the house where murderers Fred and Rosemary West carried out their foul deeds. I can't remember this, but it is possible. I admit to a fascination with gruesome venues. I also like to see places where famous people have lived and died; cemeteries are irresistible.

Viewing crime scenes is not an attractive pursuit, but arguably a 'cultural experience'. At last year’s Hospitality Ireland conference, we were told that it is vital to provide these in order to attract visitors. I take this to mean that it's not just about museums, art galleries, theatres and heritage sites, but it is also, more specifically, about highlighting the spots of cultural significance, say, where films have been made or books have been written.

The Japanese, apparently, love the English Lake District and flock there in their thousands. This is not, as one might imagine, because of the beauty of the landscape, or because they like hill-walking, but, strange as it might seem, they just love the works of Beatrix Potter, who had her home there.

One of my cheeriest and most memorable travel experiences - you could call it cultural - was a guided tour in a stretch limo to ogle the houses of the stars in Beverly Hills. I was amused to see on television the other day that an enterprising man who had enjoyed this tour now runs what are known as the 'Jilly Tours' in his native Gloucestershire.

By all accounts, they are a great success, and we watched as a busload was driven to view the gates of author Jilly Cooper's residence. The house was out of sight. Following this, we saw the bus draw up at another set of gates belonging, apparently, to Liz Hurley. One of the participants insisted on getting off the bus and speaking into the intercom. A voice, indubitably Liz Hurley's, answered. "May we speak to Ms Hurley?" the cheeky punter enquired. A long silence ensued, after which the voice said, "Liz Hurley is abroad."

It's possible that all areas can throw up a famous name or two, but I rather fancy that my own neighbourhood has more than its fair share, and word of this has travelled. When my brother-in-law was crossing from Brazil into Argentina, an official saw that he had been born in Clones, Co. Monaghan, and cried in delight, "Ah, Barry McGuigan." We can also boast a cannibal recently recollected on film, writers Pat and Eugene McCabe, a man who invented shorthand, the first Russian ambassador to the United Nations ... I could go on.

I have, incidentally, issued the Downpatrick challenge to my son-in-law, who was brought up in that area, but apart from the immediate connection with our national saint, no names have yet been forthcoming. Sometimes places are reluctant to make much of their own cultural experiences. Take Clones, for example. Every year the town hosts a film festival, yet there are no indications in the town marking the many different locations where Pat McCabe's book, The Butcher Boy, was filmed. Is it, I wonder, because there is unease with the book's iconoclastic attitude to religion?

There is, apparently, a hotel in New York where you are asked, on booking, if you have any particular interests. Then, say, your preference is for wildlife, you are given a bedroom where there are a number of books on the subject. Couples can choose a room with erotic literature. This seems such a good idea that I shall spend the winter months rearranging the large number of books on this premises. Anyone for crime or film history?

[* Lucy and Johnny Madden have done much more than re-arrange the books at Hilton Park this year – building on the literary associations of the house and area, they have started offering ‘Book Club’ weekends, to run throughout the autumn and winter – the inaugural event is next weekend, 13th and 14th November 2009, when Pat McCabe will join guests for dinner on the Saturday evening to lead the discussion. Details of this and related events are on their website, www.hiltonpark.ie]

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - Hospitality Awards

Lucy Madden ponders, among other things, the increasingly prolific (and obscure categories of) hospitality awards...

We are told, and no surprises here, that airbrushed stars in magazines leave young girls stressed and wanting to drink. It's the same effect that the annual round of hospitality awards have on me, especially when we haven't received one, or even been shortlisted.

They swish around, these awards, and the categories become ever more obscure. Soon there may be an award for the receptionist with the best teeth. At a stage in life when the onlv accolade I am likely to receive is a cuddly grandmother cup at the local fête, I gnash my teeth (I still have them) at pictures of the beaming recipients and sometimes wonder, in sour and bitter mood, how the hell did they get that?

There are awards, the Nobels, the Booker Prize, the Oscars, which one might hope would confer on the recipient the status of best in class. There are hospitality awards that are of true value, and here the Good Hotel Guide's César awards, Hospitalitv Ireland's National Hospitality Awards, and Georgina Campbell's spring to mind, because they are chosen objectively.

There is more obfuscation when, under scrutiny, the receivers of prices turn out to be paid up members of marketing organisation and that organisation has a title implying universality: potential misrepresentation occurs when this is nor made clear in the attendant publicity.

When Failte Ireland stands over these awards, it would be fairer to those who were not eligible, if it was revealed that the competition was restricted to those who had signed up to the group. Call it sour grapes, bur it's the public who are being deceived.

We may have no plaque to adorn our walls this Christmas but we are just glad still to be in business. Tremble as we all might at the prospect of next season, there just may be some advantages thrown up in this recession. So much nonsense was visited on us during the Tiger years; the spa culture, ubiquitous hotel walls of maroon and gold, tapas bars, celebrities, ostentatious displays of wealth, Failte Towers, chocolate fountains, foam, truffle oil and the list goes on. Now that Helen Lucy Burke has revealed that this latter item is distilled from petrochemicals, my loathing of it is confirmed.

My fervent hope, too, is that we can wave goodbye to the army of consultants that have clustered like boils around people getting on with proper jobs and have acted as a layer of camouflage between us and our lords and masters. "Plant spuddy-wuddies" was once hissed into my husband's ear after a long and expensive session with an agricultural consultant.

Many of those going round mentoring and telling others how to run their businesses often seem to come from a failed business background themselves. And perhaps someone can explain which department of state signed off on the plans for all those builders' hotels that received tax incentives in order to grow like mushrooms.

Could it possibly have been our own tourism authority, the one that assured us all though 2008 that it was 'all to play for': perhaps an errant 'l' crept in there and they really meant 'it's all to pay for'. Where on earth did they think they were going to get the punters to fill all those extra beds? The net result is bankrupt hotels, bankrupt banks (if such a thing is possible) and the traditional hotel stock under massive pressure to sustain itself. Who shot whom in whose foot?

All is not lost. Earlier this year I heard a programme made for BBC by the brilliant Olivia O'Lcary, explaining the collapse of our economy to British audiences. On her visits home she is dismayed by the state of the nation and the parlous state of her friends who have remained in Ireland.

Nevertheless, she ended her report on an upbeat note by saying that in spite of everything, she finds more resilience and crucially, fun, to be had here than anywhere else she goes. Who would argue with that? No-one parties like the Irish, it always seems to be the favoured activity.

Our local town, Clones, has a small committee who somehow raise enough money to host an annual film festival. They put on some of the best films that will never reach our Multiplexes because they may not have been made in Hollywood and probably have sub-titles.

A small group of local people, a dozen at best, sits in a mobile cinema watching these masterpieces while the neighbouring bars explode with activity. It’s hard not to think that talking is what we do best and what loosens tongues better than alcohol? "

Talk of which reminds me of those awards - or lack of them - anyone for a pint, then?

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - Simplicity

Lucy Madden longs for simplicity and a celebration of things Irish on our plates – and takes a trip to Belfast

Somewhere out there is a factory where a huge vat brims with an unctuous liquid waiting to be bottled and distributed to a restaurant near you. This ubiquitous thing called sauce appears in swirls, puddles and blobs partnered with just about anything, promiscuous as a serial bigamist.

Chef may have added a sprig of thyme, some pearl barley, a dash of pernod, but we are not fooled. We keep meeting it, this sauce, under fish and meat and poultry, ingredients that are perfectly fine until chef takes out the jar and does the deed. Sometimes this cloying and revealingly shiny liquid appears in the starter and the main course, even in establishments that should know better. What is going on?

Cooking has moved on a lot since the old days, as it must, but not always for the better. We don’t want culinary stagnation, but in many ways that’s what we seem to be getting if my forays into various restaurants are in any way representative.

It’s not just that damned sauce; it’s foam, and shots in glasses and unasked for twiddly bits served on slates. This is fine if you are Ferran Adria of El Bulli, who has no doubt moved on to further esoteric practices now, but that kind of cooking doesn’t necessarily work when executed by lesser mortals. If chefs want to show off their skills, a carefully honed sauce might be a good place to start.

My husband, he who is not known for his own activity in the kitchen, is sharp as a chef’s knife when it comes to knowing what is wrong with the activities of others. He blames the Early Bird menus for the demise in standards. With many restaurants forced into offering cheaper food, quality sourcing (and saucing) is the first casualty. Above everything, this quasi-international food is not what visitors to this country want to eat. This can be shouted from the rooftops, endlessly repeated, but who is listening?

A few years ago I was shocked to see that a well known food critic nominated for one of his top food awards a restaurant specialising in pizza. Do we not have a genuine cuisine that celebrates the island nation (fish everywhere) that we are? Our lovely beef, our pasture fed lamb, even poultry, do these quality food products have to be submerged in foam or decorated with that sauce?

Two of the most exciting food trends that have emerged recently are raw foods and cooking with seaweed, both of which we are well suited to the geography of Ireland. And what of the potato, only recently celebrated internationally in the Year of the Potato?

In a cash-strapped year with not a lot of activity in sight, a highlight was a day out in Belfast. We decided on a city bus tour, wondering, in a patronising kind of way, how it could be stretched to 1 hour 40 minutes as predicted. How wrong that was.

First stop the docks where the Titanic had been built and after that it just got better and better. Through this very northern of cities the bus took us through the decades of hurt, through the Falls and Andersonstown, past the wall, past the Crumlin with its underground passage to the prison, past the angry wall murals.

You could say that we were a busload of the prurient, and that may be right, but each time our bus passed a landmark that registered in our recent consciousness, you could literally feel the frisson as the passengers lurched from side to side so as to miss nothing. I’ve heard that there is a lobby to erase the political wall paintings, but hope this never happens, iconic as they are and so much of their time.

Back at our point of departure, the Jesus Bus was waiting with its fixed smile band of evangelists waving crosses waiting to welcome on board. It was all so wonderfully characterful and somehow so Belfast.

It set me thinking about that sauce and its seen everywhere quality. We don’t visit places to find what we have at home, faux foreign food fads et al. We travel because we want to find what is different. The graffiti on the walls in Belfast was created in hatred and violence but it’s part of our history.

Food and history and architecture and landscape are unique to every country. Can’t we have the confidence to celebrate that?

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - Death by Health & Safety

Lucy Madden considers the paradox of death by health & safety, among other things.

To the jaw-dropping astonishment of my husband, our accountant recently suggested that we might like to pay him less. This may have had to do with the alternative, as he saw it, of not being paid at all, or perhaps it was an acknowledgement that fees paid in the past are unsustainable.

In our world, everyone is looking for a deal. The most asked question in hospitality must be "what can you do for me?" to which, we are advised, the savviest answer is "what is your budget?" before any negotiation develops.

Thankfully, answering the telephone is something I am rarely allowed to do, since this slow-witted and often cranky woman is not skilled at bargaining. I am appalled by the necessity to negotiate price and hear myself agreeing to the most unrealistic proposals.

Haggling is not for the weak willed. I experienced excruciating embarrassment when, on holiday in Turkey, my life's companion detoured into every carpet shop, accepting each proffered cup of apple tea while insisting on challenging the price of the shop's entire range before striding out, empty-handed and unpleasantly triumphant, into the souk. Never shall I follow the example of a friend who makes it her life's purpose to bargain over even the smallest purchase.

But negotiate we must for the country is awash with offers brought about by the absurd numbers of hotel bedrooms built under tax breaks that must now stay on offer at knockdown prices. How to compete with these? How to gain an edge in this most competitive industry? The struggle for small businesses to survive in those intricately linked sectors, hospitality and food, has been compounded by an often opaque ride of legislation.

Death by health and safety has led to the closure of numerous small enterprises. Last year we had a visit from an 'inspector' who scrutinized our premises and then announced we were laying our tables inappropriately, knives and forks in the wrong places. This was a pinch-oneself-to-see-if-it-is-happening moment that one can only hope won't be repeated. Even if the inspector had been right about our table-laying etiquette, does anyone want a country where the dead hand of uniformity applies even to the positioning of cutlery?

Luckily the son of this house, being of a certain age, has received all the right training in terms of statutory regulations and can put a stop to any sluttish ways he perceives in his mother's behaviour. Nor is he reticent on the subject of other short-comings, carrying out spot checks to test us on refrigerator temperatures and precise knowledge of the colour coding on the chopping boards. We need him.

And yet. Sometime around the end of the 1990s I remember reading an article about the success of restaurants in Belgium. This is a country which, in my opinion, produces some of the best food in the world, or did so at that time. The writer noted that many of the best restaurants were family-run, with Madam at the helm and very often in premises that gave no concession to modernity, let alone health and safety.

Fat cats were spotted on kitchen tables. And isn't that just where they should be? Keeping the mice away?

So much of what has been considered sacrosanct at different times in the past - DDT, sheep dip, mobile phones, creosote, asbestos (I could go on for hours) - is in time found to be deleterious, so that it is impossible to escape the notion that experience and common sense are overwhelmingly the best guide.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against CLEAN, indeed I'm all for it, but the health of nations depends on humanity building up antibodies; this starts with colostrum, continues with breast milk and is crowned by playing in the gutter.

We now lead such sterilised lives that we depend on antibiotics to cure the least ailment; in the past immune systems were built up by exposure to germs. That this is no longer the case has massive ramifications for our health services, extending into every area of our lives and not least in hospitality. No-one wants to endanger others, but nor do we want unreasonable strictures.

Personally, I shall not be happy until every kitchen has a large cat sitting somewhere in it.

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - Here's to The Hotel Bore

There is a cartoon postcard that friends have been known to send us, entitled ‘THE GUEST FROM HELL’. It depicts a drawing room with blazing fire in front of which the club bore, refilling his glass, is regaling other guests, who are either yawning or have lost consciousness altogether. Even the dog looks frantic.

A jolly laugh greets the arrival of this postcard in our house. It sparks memories of evenings spent with vicarious embarrassment, as one guest seeks to impose his – it’s often his – anecdotes, jokes, photographs of the grandchildren, drinking songs or just views on the economy to the unwilling ears of others.

Anyone choosing to stay in private houses or small hotels can face this danger, but two things strike me about this situation. Sometimes such an encounter can take on a life of its’ own, become an adventure, something to talk about afterwards. Then there is the undoubted fact that bored guests can always choose to go to their rooms.

We have recently encountered a different kind of guest from hell. Of course, the arrival is always preceded by a telephone call or email in which, after long negotiation, the host finally agrees to charge the very minimum for the stay, so much so that it is scarcely worth opening the door. The guests (there are always two of them) sashay out of a large expensive car that has swooshed gravel up onto the front lawn.

Large heavy suitcases and clothes on hangers are left for others to carry. Looking neither left nor right, not taking in their surroundings nor their hosts, the pair make their way as quickly as possible, and with as little conversation, to their allotted bedroom, where they stay for activities that involve turning a neatly constructed bed into a whirlwind of cloth.

They will appear at the last moment for dinner, a little furtive, cleaned up in their designer outfits, press each other’s thighs under the table, not look up nor thank when their food is brought and, before returning upstairs, ask for breakfast in bed.

There is no question of social intercourse with anybody else – they seem to shudder at any attempt at friendliness. There is no danger that they will fall captive to a resident bore. When they leave, they avoid signing the visitors’ book, and there is no question of a tip. You can be sure that the electric blanket, the fire and all the lights have been left on in what was their bedroom.

Nothing wrong with any of this, you might think. They don’t give any trouble. But this is the point: we would almost prefer trouble to the feeling of being used. People who open up their homes to paying guests do so with some degree of nervousness, but also with pride and trust. We hope our guests will be interested in what we do, or at least give a passing recognition of our labours. It’s just impolite to arrive at the house of another without commenting on the view or the flowers in the hall, isn’t it?

Those indulging in romantic liaisons, meetings that used to be called ‘dirty weekends’, would do well to remember this, or perhaps choose the anonymity of a large hotel for their activities. We in smaller premises are hurt by indifference.

We welcome lovers, indeed, relish their happiness, but, like children, we want to be told if we are doing well. If we are not to be praised, then let’s hear where we can improve. We don’t want to be invisible. It’s just tolerable being treated badly if one is being paid for it, but in the current climate, when prospective guests are looking to drive down prices to uneconomic levels, it’s hard to bear.

A remedy for this situation was proposed by a friend in tourism, who suggested that we follow the Ryanair route. We could charge, say, €1 to stay for a night in our premises, but then make a charge for every individual service, such as food, sheets, heating, car parking.

At our meals we could emulate the American breakfast system by charging for ‘side orders’, add-ons for every sausage. Those little extras, like birthday cakes and afternoon tea, which are presently given free of charge, will start to appear on bills.

Owners of large cars who won’t pay reasonable charges, beware.

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - Seeing Ireland The Official Way

In her article this month Lucy Madden laments increased bureaucracy and the apparent desire of the tourism authorities in Ireland to make all accommodation uniform - quashing any charm & character that individuality brings along the way.

Picture this. Somewhere in a condominium in Florida, Duane and Barbra, third generation Americans, are planning their first trip to Ireland to seek out their roots. Before them is spread out the ample literature provided by the Irish Tourist Board. They have saved for this journey for years and have decided to opt for bed and breakfast accommodation.

They are a little nervous about their forthcoming adventure and want to pre-book, so are discussing their requirements. “We’ve got to find some place where the tables are laid correctly, with cutlery of uniform design. And I’d like a choice of two fishes for breakfast,” says Barbra. “I’ll need an all-night floodlit parking lot,” says Duane. “We don’t want anywhere where the telephone rings more than 5 times,” Barbra insists “And if the walls in the rooms are plain I must insist on some homey prints. They’d better be framed. Oh, and we don’t want any low ceilings in the bedrooms.” They scrutinize their brochures and behold, there is a whole category of bed and breakfast accommodation that ticks all their boxes. What is more, it is the Five Star category.

Imagine different, more discerning kind of independent travellers planning a holiday in Ireland who, not unreasonably, assume that the best way to get to know the country is to stay in private houses where the famed Irish hospitality can be experienced at first hand. The home stay can shed a light on a country’s culture in a way that more commercial premises cannot hope to match.

A little wary of dog hairs on the bedspreads and the smell of chips our travellers decide to book into what has been deemed by the Tourist Board to be Five Star Bed and Breakfast accommodation. It would not be unreasonable for them to expect that the recommended homes were places of charm and individuality.

Alas, disappointment would ensue. Our travellers, if the ‘Appointed Contractors’ get their way, might find themselves pulling up at establishments of vile design, luminous as a seaside pier, with once surrounding meadows obliterated under the dead hand of decking and tar macadam and perhaps overlooking a roundabout.

The first aforementioned scenario is, in spite of what those who run our tourist board may imagine, most unlikely. The second is imminent. Once again, with no lessons learned, a long diatribe of bureaucratic, PC piece of gobbledegook has been foisted on a highly praised area of the hospitality industry which is already under huge pressure from the follies of government.

I had to stop reading the implementation document halfway through its 40 pages to prevent bursting blood vessels. Who put this dreadful document together and at what cost? Why this arrogant assumption that one-size fits all, that the dead hand of uniformity must be applied across the land and that anybody, anybody, will want to visit a country whose glorious landscapes have already been desecrated, only to find all individual endeavours have been crushed?

“Good taste” is mentioned in the document, but what is that? One person’s ‘good taste’ is another’s naff. The corollary of the directive that plain walls ‘to be decorated with framed prints or pictures’ could mean that patterned wallpaper must not be so decorated. The cheek of it.

Why do dining rooms have to have side-boards? Most foreign visitors I know would every time prefer a friendly chat in the kitchen in company with, yes, a forbidden washing machine and a sleeping dog rather than a uniform ‘resident’s lounge’ with the mandatory TV.

Have the lunatics finally taken over the asylum? Has this document been thought through? Take, for example the directive about the fish that anyone claiming five-star status must comply with. We all know that fresh fish is not available every day over vast swathes of this land, even the parts near the coast. The assumption that a host could produce a choice of two fresh fish before 8 am of a morning, especially a Sunday morning, is risible.

I fear that the chloroform pad of bureaucratic regulation and conformity may just be the nail in the coffin for people working in a sector already struggling to overcome over-whelming problems.

Remembering our most interesting and remarkable holiday experiences paying to stay in the homes of others, caves in the Gorge du Tarn, a tiny attic bedroom in Morocco, a cliff top cottage in Cornwall which had no electricity, a farmhouse in California with a caged bird in every room and where you had to stay in your bedroom between the hours of seven to nine p.m. while the family ate; all these we loved.

I know that none of these wonderful places would qualify for even the minimum standards set by Failte Ireland. People coming to this country deserve more. This document makes me so sad and angry that I’ll have to return to gnaw at it at a later date.

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - What Price Authenticity

"People abroad no longer think Ireland possesses a naturally unspoiled environment, because the truth is out there."

“Authentic: not imaginary, false fake or imitation: genuine, OED." Ah. So that's what it means, says himself, closing the dictionary. One might be forgiven for believing that it means just the opposite; we are told that the diktat currently regimenting bed and breakfast establishments will provide visitors with an "authentic" experience of Irish life.

The 40 page document, mentioned on these pages before, which insists even for its basic level of approval, that the premises conform to a rigid set of rules will have the effect of littering the country with identical, unauthentic clones.

This has a special irony since the emphasis this season from on high is 'fun,' with photographs of grinning lovelies bursting forth from sun-kissed shores and it's not hard to imagine the smiles vanishing when the reality of staying in an Irish home turns out to be in a place with 'professionally printed menus', 'prices on display in the hall' and a room number on the door.

It's hard to imagine a host being fun when nervously anticipating an 'inspection' at any time, even of the private family rooms, as is permitted. The son of this house stalks us with the rule book. In the past the beautifully balanced see-sawing between chaos and good service reflected, I suggest, all that was loved in Irish hospitality. Why can't we cherish idiosyncrasies rather than seek to eradicate them?

When I first came to live in Ireland some 38 years ago, I was told that this was a country where you could do anything you wanted, as long as it was called by a different name. Hence contraception became period adjusting, abortion was a holiday in England, no divorce was allowed but everywhere people were leaving spouses to set up home with another. Today we seem to take a concept and make the facts, or fiction, fit it.

Take, for example, the word 'green' used as a philosophy, not a colour. By its very nature, business tourism is not green. In a world where video-conferencing is available almost everywhere, the notion of encouraging business people to fly all over the globe to meet up can never be construed as green, however lucrative it may be. Yet in the publication 'A Guide to Running Green Meetings and Events' advice is dished out on making your un-green event somehow environmentally positive.

And no, authors of this publication, people abroad no longer do think Ireland possesses a naturally unspoilt environment, because the truth is out there. We can pat ourselves on the back that the Lonely Planet Guide still places us amongst the friendliest of countries, but the idea that we are perceived abroad as unspoiled is a myth. And the trouble with using the word 'authentic' in relation to accommodation is that it gives the false impression that the historic or familial is being regarded. It's hard to imagine a lovely old Rectory or fishing lodge fulfilling even the minimum standards demanded by Failte Ireland without the buildings being entirely gutted.

An American visitor to our house the other day commented on its 'charmingly shabby' aspect. "Don't say that, someone might hear you." I cried, distressed beyond measure. Seeing that I was hurt, our visitor insisted that his comment had been a compliment, he liked the nuances of a house lived in by the same family for generations. He welcomed the fact that we don't have televisions in the bedrooms and that one of the wallpapers dates back to 1830. Unfortunately we are living in a country still ashamed of much of its history and determined to erase it.

Two honest toilers, my husband and myself, were once told that we belonged to a 'sub-culture', presumably because we were not part of the mainstream Catholic, GAA, Gaelic speaking Ireland. Can a sport-hating atheist contribute to cultural life here today? Happily, I think our time may have come.

At a recent conference of the Irish Historical Houses Association, Terence Dooley, Professor of History at Maynooth College announced a new course in Built Heritage Studies, reflecting a new interest in conservation. So far this summer, in spite of everything, there has been a lot of fun out there, too, with blue skies and festivals and improvised events around every bend.

In a short drive the other day we passed A Duck Race, a Mad Hatters Tea Parry and a whole town hosting a Get to Know You event. It's hard to imagine these homely happenings occurring during the Tiger years.

Do we dare to hope that the clouds of recession are breaking up? Even the most-asked question in hospitality "How are your bookings?" just recently is more likely to be met with a response like "Looking up!" than the gloomy murmurings of a few months ago.

And, just as long as those who regulate our business allow us to remain 'charmingly shabby' for a while yet, we may survive, a sub-culture struggling to hang on to what many people out there come here to find.

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - Self Improvement - and the dangers of Self Promotion

Lucy Madden ponders the benefits of Self Improvement – and the dangers of Self Promotion

Travelling home by plane to Ireland the other day I noticed that all three passengers in our row, myself included, were reading Self-Help books. On one side I peeked at a tome called The Rules of Life, on the other Why Men and Makeup are not Enough. On my knee, more introspectively, was a Guide to the Stone-Age Diet. This observation was rather bracing.

There are those competent souls who mock the very notion of Self-Help books; I have found them on occasion to be life-changing and still own a much thumbed first edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People. My companions on the plane were both female and young and I silently wished them well as we disembarked into our lives.

We all need help. I had taken my 10 year granddaughter to London for a weekend of the kind of sight-seeing I had never done when I lived in that city. It was a cold, wet January, so we supposed that we would have unobstructed entry into all the places that attract the bigger summer crowds.

Our first destination was a City bus tour where I parted with what was to be the whole day’s spending allowance. A voice shouted “Standing room only”. We were surrounded by a babble of foreign voices that drowned out the traffic noise. Maps became weapons as they were unfolded. At snail like pace we drove through central London, stopping at points of interest and discommoding the natives.

Passing under London Eye, the sight of a long queue waiting in the rain for entry deterred us from joining it, and we journeyed on to the Tower of London where another queue snaked around the corner of that great stone building.

It was the same wherever we went, crowds of people speaking in tongues. The restaurants were full, the shops busy, even a mediocre musical we sat through in a West End theatre attracted a full house. “There’s not much sign of a recession” the granddaughter observed. I suggested we visit Madame Tussauds. “Don’t even think about it” said my sister who lives in central London. “You’ll queue for hours.”

London is not cheap, it is a formidable sprawl and the natives are not always friendly, but it has a distinctive history, a positive identity, and it is very diverse. Obviously it is one of the world’s great cities but I got to thinking that if there are so many people all over the world with so much money, why can’t we attract more of them over here?

The truth is, sad to say, Ireland is just not as interesting a destination as it was ten years ago. So much has gone; the whole idiosyncratic, beautiful playground has been damaged. And what worries me is that those in power don’t understand what is lost or how to correct the situation.

The drive to categorise, to standardise and label isn’t going to encourage people to come here and may just put them off. The crowds in London aren’t looking for ‘quality assurance symbols’ but a unique experience and there that is being delivered. You only have to witness the Ruritanian world that revolves around Buckingham Palace to know what that means. British standoffishness over the EU may raise eyebrows, but it has enabled them to retain and celebrate their national identity.

One of the problems, as I see it, is our obsession with marketing. Last year I attended various meetings and conferences and was often struck how the emphasis was almost entirely on promoting businesses rather than the product itself.

It’s all e.speak and social networking and of course this is vital but it’s far from everything. Time was once set aside to discuss ways of improving what we offer and yes, perhaps it was to the detriment of selling it. But no amount of skilful and sophisticated marketing techniques will in the end continue to sell a product unless it excels; there’s just so much competition out there.

Perhaps we should all be asking ourselves, is what we are doing good enough, is it good value? And undeniably one of the most effective ways of bringing in visitors is the often under-estimated power of ‘word-of-mouth’.

David Nicholls’ novel ‘One Day’ was published with no fanfare and few reviews, yet became a global bestseller because readers recommended it to their friends. Do not most of us prefer to visit a place that comes with a personal stamp-of-approval?

Only a fool would deny the impact of the Internet and its tools, but no amount of self promotion will disguise short-comings at the point of delivery. As far as this house is concerned, from now on a little navel-gazing and a volume or two on Self-Improvement will be on the agenda.

Kindly supplied by the respected food service and drinks industry magazine, Hospitality Ireland. Click here to read more about them

Insider View - On Being Appropriate

Lucy Madden ponders, in her inimitable way, on the inexact science of appropriateness - and its importance in the hospitality business

Photographed outside the High Court at the end of last year, having just lost a much publicised case involving rights of way, the litigant was displaying a daring amount of cleavage. It struck me as a curious choice of garment in which to attend court, dressed as for cocktails. My sister, my eyes upon the wider world, tells me that women of all ages attend business meetings with copious amounts of breast on display.

I question whether it is my age that brings disapproval of this, and younger members of this household tell me that it’s the fashion and nothing more, but still I wonder and was not surprised when one of the Dragon’s Den panel spoke out about this and warned cleavage displayers that they risked being sidelined for promotion.

The whole question of inappropriate dressing and the messages sent out by choice of clothing is one that has always divided the generations. But we’d generally agree, for sure, that setting aside the sex industry (another story) in the hospitality business we want to be looked after by people who are clean, tidily dressed and not displaying unnecessary body parts. Big hair, straggly beards, glimpses of midriff or worse, buttock, and yes, breasts, are just not on. We don’t want sweat, grime or flaky habits.

As someone who suffers from repulsion, my worst moments are spent in public lavatories seeing employees of the premises exit from sessions there without hand-washing. Braver friends speak out to the culprits about this, that it happens at all is shocking.

In a department store recently I saw a member if staff go straight from flushing back to the sandwich counter. When eating in a restaurant where the kitchen is visible, I try to position myself in a seat that enables me to see any gross practices, slurping, nose wiping and the like; it’s as inappropriate in a kitchen as in a surgery.

Inappropriate: it’s such a useful word, and it’s a state of being, like bad taste, that you can’t necessarily describe but you know it when you see it and see it you do, for example, on restaurant menus around the country. Now this is a shame because a wonderful opportunity awaits us.

We, who face years of grinding austerity, are told that the future of this country will depend on our agricultural sector, and this presents us with a great opportunity, at last, to become the Food Island that Bord Bia has long been promoting.

The pity is that we didn’t become an organic haven years ago: too late for that, but not too late to promote a cuisine specifically Irish rather than one that apes global trends. This scramble to be international with our food must have to do with the aspirations of Irish chefs to win Michelin stars. This seems to necessitate a strategy of the baroque on a plate, over-complicating with blobs, twiddles and swirls.

Many years ago I had the privilege of eating the food of Catherine Healy, whose tragic early death robbed Ireland of one of its best restaurateurs. It was a dinner of the utmost simplicity but it was one of the most exquisite and memorable meals of my life. Yet her food might not be appreciated today because it seems we are only impressed by displays of extravagance and the foams and truffle shavings that have become de rigueur in establishments looking to win one of those precious accolades.

We had dinner lately in a restaurant that had been tipped, but failed, to win a Michelin star. The dishes were imaginative and extravagant with trendy miniscule Kilner jars of this and that, but every diner, regardless of what was ordered, was given a side plate with ubiquitous supermarket broccoli, a few carrots and a wedge of not quite cooked potato.

I’m sorry, but this is just not appropriate when ‘fine dining’. And what is a ‘chive reduction’ (in January, when chives don’t grow) or ‘Elemental cheese’, ‘meatball tartine’, ‘potato scale’, all offerings spotted recently on menus. Do we need Won Ton Baskets, drizzles of chocolate oil, splashes of curry oil or that show-stopper the ‘balsamic reduction’ when we have such wonderful home-grown produce in our fields, waterways and gardens?

One of the tastiest, reasonably priced and yes, appropriate dishes I have eaten this year in a public place was at The Old Jameson Distillery in Dublin. For €12 the seafood platter was what I assume every tourist would welcome.

Imagine yourself holidaying in a country with an identifiable cuisine, say Italy, France or Turkey, and being served a hotchpotch of so-called fusion food. My guess is you would be very disappointed and if we are to encourage people to come to this country, a return to a more indigenous cuisine won’t come a day too soon.

Insider View - On Festivals

Lucy Madden reflects on the life enhancing power of festivals – even when it rains

“We’re not coming to stay” said the woman at the front door. “But the parrot is.” So began the 2011 Flat Lake Arts and Literary Festival here in Co. Monaghan. What is it that makes festivals, events that expose one over a number of days to the vagaries of the weather, a monotonous diet and the stern gaze of Security, so utterly compelling?

Fields garlanded with camper vans and tents that shiver in the wind are not pretty to the eye, and the lavatory arrangements for thousands are best not contemplated, so why do we put them on? Our own little festival, this year competing as it did with Bloom, Writers’ Week at Listowel and several local sporting events, seemed a precarious undertaking. And yet.

Writing In his Devil’s Dictionary,1911, Ambrose Bierce defined Hospitality as ‘The virtue which induces us to feed and lodge certain persons who are not in need of food and lodging’; a definition which for those experienced in the industry will undoubtedly strike a chord. But it’s different with festivals; the opening of the gates brings on the possibility of a more democratic, all-in-this-together, encompassing kind of experience.

It’s about taking what comes, almost a suspension of reality. The absence of hierarchy, the chance of chatting with your favourite writer, or musician, or just your neighbour or turning a corner knowing that you will always find the unexpected are what make festivals such time-out-of-life events.

During the first evening, and under a still hot sun, I was asked “Do you view this with horror, or awe, or delight?” The answer was all three emotions, of course. There was still the pre-festival angst, would the weather hold? Would enough people turn up? Would the performers perform?

For us living in the middle of an evolving and extended campsite there were other issues. Cole Porter’s ‘tinkling piano in the next apartment’ had romance; six tinkling pianos night and day in the middle of the field next to our house, was another thing. Yards from our bedroom window bands would thud out their music into the dawn and daybreak would bring the certainty of finding strangers in our kitchen, and comatose bodies sleeping under bushes.

There was, too, the uncertainty of promised appearances. We had been told that actor and writer Sam Shepherd (be still my beating heart) was on his way. Then suddenly he is here, and Ulick O’Connor and John Banville and Antony Cronin are sharing hay bales.

And where else, but at the festival, would I find myself sharing breakfast with a man (Robert Fisk) who is telling me about his three interviews with Osama Lid Laden? How else would I know they had eaten naan bread?

Festivals are full of opportunities. Anyone can turn up with a story, a poem or an instrument. A man made music out of a Hoover. There was a poetry slam where local people of all ages read their work. Who would have known there were so many poets on our doorstep?

A woman arrived with a sewing machine to teach children how to make skirts out of recycled plastic. A man who had recently joined a creative writing class was encouraged on stage to read his story about a blind boy in the Holocaust. A little girl was selling her homemade Welsh cakes. Children were splattered with mud and sand and nobody cared.

Then, on day three, the skies turned steel grey and the rain began. As the hours passed, the wind whipped the tents and water gathered in muddy pools. The food was beginning to run out, but gallantly the visitors ignored the storm and gathered under any canvass that hadn’t been washed away in the deluge.

At one stage I was serving venison sausages on wet paper plates and I heard a man say “It’s odd. You see kinds of people at festivals that you never see at any other time” And looking round, I knew what he meant; you couldn’t imagine these rain soaked and colourful individuals who were so merrily embracing the moment had ever queued at Tesco or spent the weekend mowing the lawn.

Nobody complained or looked for one moment as if they weren’t having fun. I wanted to thank each and every one of them for their joy of life and thanks too, and it’s not exaggerating to point this out, for instilling in one world weary and cynical heart, a little bit of hope for the future of the human race.

Insider View - On 'The Best'

This month Lucy Madden’s hawk-eyed view of Irish life and hospitality focuses on ‘the best’...

A friend has presented me with a packet of recycled plastic clothes-pegs. Not a gift to set the pulses racing, you will agree, but one for which I am very grateful. These pegs, unlike their competitors that snap in the first breeze and gather on the floor of the yard, are capable of keeping a wet carpet on the washing line while the weather does its worst.

This has set me thinking, if you hear of anyone proposing to manufacture clothes pegs, advise caution. These pegs are just so much better than any others, they set a standard to which all others must be compared.

We have examples in the world of hospitality. There are little centres of such excellence as to promote a feeling of dispiritedness in competitors. We all know who they are, in my part of the world the name Neven Maguire springs to mind, and therein a lesson that without the combination of talent, commitment and above all, generosity of spirit, a place is unlikely to survive in these times.

The success of MacNean House & Restaurant, therefore, left me with a sense of bewilderment when I opened the new Good Food Ireland map to find a white desert covering the border counties and pondered how sad it would be for tourists travelling in this area to miss the good food available.

The subject of Guides has been covered on these pages before, but nothing has changed and there are organisations claiming to promote ‘the best’ when in reality an often large payment is necessary for inclusion. Those who are reluctant, or can’t, pay a fee, get left out. And who loses? The traveller, silly.

The success of Neven Maguire must have in part been due to the fact that his business is family run. Now, too, that I’ve become the granny in the kitchen, I can appreciate what a pillar of strength I am. No task is too demeaning for me; I will pot wash and scrub for long hours without a cigarette or tea break. I don’t ask much, I’m unlikely to strike, nor do I demand wages, just an occasional and appreciative pat from the passing chef. I can take over a curdling sauce, or feed an intruding child, I’m even allowed out for a chat with the guests. I’m irreplaceable.

Businesses that don’t have someone like me on the premises are bound to suffer in these difficult times with wages to pay and statutory regulations at the wave of every spoon. I have long held the view that one of the problems in the world is that it is there are too many young people running it. I would think that, wouldn’t I, no longer being young (or anything near it) but you only have to look at the damage done by reckless and greedy young men in the financial world.

A small family business can combine the wisdom of age with the creativity of youth. This was confirmed on a recent BBC Food programme by the numbers of young people who had previously worked in the corporate world now recreating themselves in small family food producing businesses and discovering the advantages of doing so.

One family unit that demonstrates the advantages of working well together resides in Phoenix Park. My seven year old granddaughter Nell wrote to this family cheekily saying that she would love to see around their house. Not long afterwards, an invitation arrived asking her whole family to a party on the premises.

Scrubbed up, and in their best clothes, this family of six drove up to Aras an Uachtarain, where along with other families from all over Ireland, they were treated to some hours of entertainment and a tea about which they are still talking.

But the highlight of the visit was a personal meeting with the President and her husband Dr. McAleese – and Nell was taken in first with her gift of buns – and the graciousness and hospitality shown to all their guests that day impressed and, yes surprised, my family. The President spoke to the assembled families and asked that people should not stay in their little groups but make a new friend.

On the tour of the house (that was on the agenda too) my daughter followed this advice and commented to a woman standing near her that she looked very like the President. “I’m her sister” was the reply, after which the house tour was moved up to another level with an insider’s view on life in the Presidential home.

Nell and her family came home and spoke about their visit with awe. You could say that garden parties are what Presidents are supposed to do – but by all accounts this one was imbued with a generosity of spirit that made the occasion memorable.

And for all the difficulties facing us all now, this is still a country where that spirit is strong. Nobody does it better.

Insider View - On What Went Wrong

Like many of us in Ireland today, Lucy Madden is asking, What Went Wrong?

Some 20 years ago my daughter was the first generation of Trinity graduates who did not, as she said at the time, “get straight on the plane”. For the first time in decades young, educated Irish people had the possibility of making their lives on this island and many of them did, including my daughter, who at that time of graduation could never have envisaged the day when she joined a dole queue.

I saw such a queue recently in the seemingly prosperous surroundings of Maynooth and it stretched as far as my eyes could see. Earlier on the same day I had been in Carton House and walked around in that magnificent parkland and sensed the struggle to keep going that is everywhere now on this island that seemed to be so full of opportunities to my daughter’s generation. Again and again, the question must be asked, where did it all go so wrong?

Part of the problem, as I see it, was the historical necessity to reinvent ourselves. Necessary because a country that is ashamed of its history has no imperative to preserve it. Away with the old, we are the masters now!

We are often asked by bewildered tourists “where are all the old buildings?” and the answer must be ‘gone, eradicated, and lost’. It appears that the reality presented to the visitors to this country is very different from the expectations. With heritage having been identified as one of the top attractions for tourists it’s just a pity that this wasn’t given more credence when the opportunities were still there. But no, a new faux sophistication had us in its grip, and the reinvention of the country took off.

Who wanted to restore an old building when you could buy up a few apartments in Bulgaria? A number of our historic houses are preserved but have hideous structures clamped on their sides and sit in a carpet of tarmacadam. Lovely landscapes have been taken over by golf courses, spas and ‘well-being centres’, fields become car showrooms and shopping malls. Nothing wrong with that, you might say, except that we don’t have population to pay for it all and we are paying now in a very different way.

My daughter of the dole queue has spent some of her now free time this summer happily pedalling along the Great Western Greenway, mentioned previously in this column. This track that runs from Westport to Achill Island has given delight to her and her children at no cost and her remedy for the country’s ills is to cover this island with a network of similar green trails.

Alongside these tracks could spring up cafés and tearooms serving locally grown (yes, she knows the buzzwords) food at affordable prices. Ireland can truthfully be promoted again as a safe, family friendly destination where even the rain can be part of a wholesome experience. What need to fry on an overcrowded Mediterranean beach when you can pedal or stroll freely breathing sweet fresh air of the natural world far away from the polluting chaos of the modern world? It’s not too late and we have it on our doorstep.

And just look what it would do for us besides stimulating micro-enterprises; provide jobs in the building of them; earn precious foreign currency from visitors and encourage our citizens to spend theirs’ at home; revitalise our B&B and small hotel trade and by utilising disused railways and towpaths reintroduce ‘the wilderness factor’ into the Irish experience, so much of which has been lost in our scenic areas.

On the subject of heritage, one small project, as yet in its infancy, is causing interest in this house. Overseas guests arrive who have visited the capital city and found it to be wanting and in truth when compared to many European cities it is a little short of places of interest.

Here again, so much of the past has been eradicated, but there is a new small museum opening on St. Stephen’s Green that will chronicle the history of Dublin. To be sure, when tourists ask us what to see in the city the Little Museum of Dublin will be a welcome addition.

And through small, entrepreneurial projects like this, perhaps will spring up once again a country where young people don’t have to board aeroplanes to secure a happy future.

Together with her husband Johnny & family, Lucy Madden runs their magnificent 18th century mansion, Hilton Park, Clones, Co Monaghan as a country house which is open to private guests, groups, small weddings and conferences. The restored formal gardens are also open by arrangement. Lucy is a keen organic gardener and also a member of the Irish Food Writers Guild.

Insider View - Keeping Cheerful

It has been a merry season. Never mind, for a moment, that we live under a tomb-like pall of grey, or that the misery of unemployment is all around us, small groups of people have got together to see that our world is not entirely without cheer.

I shall call it the Yvonne effect, after our local mayor. The putative Yvonne, a mother of 11 and a full-time laundress, somehow finds the hours to organise the community into spirit-raising events while, I must add enviously, managing to look like a teenager herself. And she is always smiling.

This year the Yvonne effect was evidenced around this country, largely to the south of our border town, as was articulated by a friend from the North who, attending the recent Monaghan Food Fair, pointed out that there was much more community spirit in the Republic.

I can’t argue with that, but our whole summer and autumn has been punctuated by a series of little festivals and gatherings celebrating or commemorating, providing distraction for those unable to afford holidays, and destinations of interest for visitors to this land.

In our local town of Clones, Co. Monaghan, there has been the Famine Commemoration. Now the famine is a subject which for a long time was taboo, and a friend asked to write a book on the subject was unable to do so for lack of documentary evidence, but it is a subject of great interest to visitors to this house, especially those of American and Antipodean origins, researching their roots. After all, many of them are the descendants of that particular diaspora.

The reckless and probably illegal destruction of our local Workhouse earlier this year caused much anger, but was alleviated by the decision to allow Clones to host the National Famine Commemoration. This prompted a weeklong calendar of events culminating in a visit by President McAleese, who with dignity and compassion, managed to make the event into a profoundly moving experience.

The only contentious issue was the decision to prettify and disguise our shut-down shops, but I am told that this often precedes visits of the great and good. We took a South African guest to the commemoration, and wide-eyed she said that the afternoon had given her more insight into the culture and history of this country than anything seen in previous visits.

On our doorstep too we have had a Fleadh Cheoil, a Blacksmith’s festival, road races, a Jazz festival, the aforementioned Food Fair, and most of these taking place under the unforgiving rain. As someone who feels personally responsible for the weather, and although most tourists will say ‘we don’t come to Ireland for the sun’, we who have to endure it year round have stopped pretending that it doesn’t matter.

Rain, almost but not quite, stopped play at Ireland’s first Mushroom Festival, which took place this autumn at Killegar in Co. Leitrim. This was the creation of Sue Kilbracken, the Australian widow of the late writer Lord Kilbracken, and the day was packed with fungal events and forays around the woods and lakes of the lovely but somewhat forlorn old estate. On this island we have some six and a half thousand species of wild fungi and a number of enthusiasts, amateurs and professionals, who want to draw our attention to their existence. That afternoon in Killegar, wet-necked and bending over a group of amanita phalloides a co-forager said to me “This is what we should celebrate in this country, our wonderful natural heritage.” It was then I began to think about the spas.

For years I have railed about the spas. Yes, they have popped up everywhere with their white interiors, flawless girls and infinity pools and we have consistently resisted developing anything resembling one ourselves. We also have felt rather smug about it. “We prefer the natural landscape” our cry has been, waving at a field of rushes and sodden sheep. But I am beginning to think we were wrong. Questioning friends who choose to stay in hotels which seem to have no attributes apart from their ‘wellness centres’ the answer is always something like this; spas are not weather dependent.

One of this country’s most successful and celebrated hoteliers told us he would not have survived the last few years without his spa. Too late for us, of course, but my holiday in the west of Ireland with grandchildren could have ended in a murder had it not been for the welcome presence of a hotel swimming pool.

Give me a warm, white towelling dressing gown after a session bird-watching in the marshes, follow it with a Hot Stone Body Massage or a softime float experience with nothing but the gentle tones of some World Music and I shall be happy. Nature and spas, we need both.

Insider View - Goodbye to 2011

This may be the season of goodwill but Lucy Madden’s feet are still very firmly on the ground as she reflects on an ‘interesting’ year and shares some incredibly awful (and hopefully isolated) dining experiences that seem inexplicable in a country where good food and hospitality are seen as fundamental to our national recovery - Christmas will be a welcome break, but there’s certainly plenty of urgent work to get stuck into come January!

Goodbye 2011, we shall not regret your passing. In our family we have seen something previously unimaginable; a daughter on the dole. A local solicitor, advising a neighbour about mortgage repayments, asked: “My first question has to be, are you suicidal? So many of my clients are…” What have we come to?

In a large hotel in Dublin we whispered to the receptionist: “Are you in NAMA?” His face reddened, there was a long pause before he said “No...no.” But the price of the bedrooms and the scarcity of staff told a different story. In the surrounding landscaped areas the weeds were gathering and the roses were unpruned. I thought; here’s an opportunity for an unemployed person (the daughter?) - Why not propose yourself and a hoe? Now that the next generation has taken over the running of our house, the commercial side at least, we are left fidgeting in the wings, looking for work for others to do.

The onset of winter has this old misery guts turning her thoughts, for the first time, to the possibilities of a cruise. Many of our guests from the Antipodes this year were just off, or just off to, a cruise of some description and the enthusiasm was unrestrained. The most often repeated phrase ‘and you can eat all you want’ seems very relevant these days.

Imagine too, the charms of pitching up at, say, the romantic destinations of the Baltic, Copenhagen, Riga, St. Petersburg, without ever having to go near an airport. Oh joy! One of the benefits of reduced income is that the temptation to use airports is lessened. The country that takes a radical approach to making its airports places of charm instead of obstacle courses should reap the benefits in terms of visitor numbers. Meantime sail away seems a more attractive option.

For those of us neither sailing nor flying anywhere in 2011, this was an opportunity to get to know the home country a little better. And, of course, we are like litmus paper when it comes to hearing the impressions of these shores from foreign visitors.

Mostly, their experiences were good, but there is an area which often seemed to cause disappointment and this is in the provision of good food at reasonable prices. I know what these critics mean; this year I had the most outstandingly awful restaurant food I have ever encountered. Kindness prevents me mentioning the name of the restaurant, but it has been in existence for some years and garners a modicum of good reviews.

In a dismal, just off street, setting, we who were the first arrivals of the evening, were the last to be served. We were six diners, and we all ordered different dishes, but every one that (eventually) arrived included a semi-circle of chopped, uncooked Swiss chard. It came with the paté, in Caesar salad, with fish pie and in one of my courses the chard leaves were clinging to a soggy crouton that I suspected was a refugee from the previous Caesar salad.

In the aforementioned fish pie I counted two bite-sized pieces of fish under a brick of mashed potato. Taking aside a man who appeared to be in charge of this sub-standard event, I pointed out that large leaves of uncooked Swiss chard were actually unpalatable, only to be met with a stare of pure hatred.

Some Americans told us of a Chinese restaurant in the Midlands, recommended to them, where the food was so poor that they left it barely touched on the plates. Without comment, a waitress removed the plates and when they went to pay, they remarked politely that they had been disappointed. ‘Never mind,’ said the man at the till, clearly affronted ‘I’ll wrap it up and you can take it home.’ Quite how he thought this resolved the problem, I know not, but our friends declined the offer and handed over their money, which was accepted.

A more unpleasant encounter was regaled to us by a friend involved a restaurant in the south where all the orders in a largish party were mixed up; the food was cold and unappetising. Our friend asked to see the manager, whereupon a large man in a chef’s hat emerged from the kitchen, followed by three tremulous youths. The tone was aggressive, “I am the chef and the manager.” Our friend was told “Who cooked your meal, tell me and I will sack them.” Our friend insisted there was no individual responsible but there followed a loud and angry confrontation with our friend being labelled a “trouble-maker” and “I know your sort.”

When I recounted this incident to our own chef, the son of the house, he of a kinder nature than me pointed out that people these days are working under great strain, and kitchen life has its own added pressures. This reminded me of the words of the late writer Josephine Hart that ‘damaged people are dangerous’. There are a lot of damaged people in this country at the moment.

Insider View - On Retirement

Retirement, what retirement? Lucy Madden contemplates the joys of being the ‘older generation’ in a family business.

“Whose teeth are false?” You may know the ad: two silver-haired models are baring their fangs at the camera as they cycle off, bronzed and glowing, into a sunny future. It’s about as far from the reality of false teeth as I can imagine since a set of dentures are as unmistakable as a ship’s foghorn, and I should know, I look at a pair of them every day.

That false teeth can pass without notice is, I am coming to realise, one of the myths spun around those of advancing years, which is to say that the perception of retirement and the reality inhabit different worlds.

Few of my generation, us of the silvery locks, are able to idle on golf courses, take day trips to the seaside or end the day with a round of bridge. Isn’t this what retirement was supposed to mean? A few golden years before Zimmer frames and stair lifts become the reality? Instead, something rather different is emerging: others have plans for us.

Revisiting a country house hotel the other day we were greeted not as we expected by the usual genial host but by his son, and when we enquired about the father’s whereabouts, we were told he had retired, so it was a little surprising to spot dear old dad, over the course of our visit, not whiling away the hours in a pleasant reverie, but carrying suitcases and sweeping the yard.

When we handed over the reins of our own establishment to the next generation, we had not envisaged a future like this, but sinister little questions by those now in charge are creeping in. “How much help are you prepared to give?” we are asked. “Will you be around most of the summer?” During the years when we ran the show, we employed college students during the busy summer months and these girls deserve tribute for their exemplary enthusiasm, loyalty and hard work. Now that the last batch have graduated and are respectively an accountant, a social worker and a member of the Liverpool Philharmonic, we notice they have not been replaced. Are we to be the replacements? Should we not be told?

When we were growing up in the 1960s, top of the wish list was to leave home as soon as possible. The present generation of young tend not to have this option, so it is that three, even four generations find themselves living under the same roof. This is how we live, and mostly it is delightful, but since we decided not to cash in on the children’s inheritance and invest it in a good retirement home, there are obligations on all sides.

I can see that the spouse and I are to be transmogrified into a kind of rapid response unit, ready at all times to assist in whatever role is required. After all, aren’t we experienced in front-of-house, as chefs, launderers and waiters? And after all, isn’t 60 supposed to be the new 40? Maybe now that genuine employees can’t be afforded, we will have to shape up.

Across the Atlantic retirees appear to be having a better time of it. The annual Yuletide ‘boast post’, although diminished in number, brought us news of the travels of two elderly acquaintances who signed off their travelogue (‘which included ‘bouncing around the Middle East.’) with a Happy New Year from ‘this cute little old couple.’

When not circumnavigating the world, they read novels, monitor their weight, go to the opera and worry about global warning, Their letter, inevitably, progresses to a list of the achievements of their grandchildren; how, for example, Tibor, aged 11, has just finished reading Steve Jobs’ bio. You will get the picture.

But as we here enter into the year with the rubber gloves at the ready and the passports put away for another year, it occurs to me that there is something to be said for the way events are turning out. We may not be able to cycle off happily into the future, we may find ourselves bottle washing, polishing silver or grappling with the laundry, but we are needed. A cute little old couple? Please, anything but that.

Insider View - on Staycations

Lucy Madden contemplates the gentle pleasures of the ‘staycation’:“A day out in, say, the Glens of Antrim or even the Liffey Valley Shopping Centre can be more restorative than two trans Atlantic flights”

A neighbour, a lady of Scandinavian origin who likes to talk of her peripatetic lifestyle, and who I meet occasionally queuing in the post office, always asks me the same question. “And where are you going on holiday this year?” The tone is loud and imperious. Since the answer has been, in the last couple of years, nowhere, I heard myself, as the post office queue strained to hear the answer, replying to her most recent enquiry ‘Costa Rica.’

That was a black lie; not only is it a country that I would not put on a list of places to see before you die, its exact location is unknown to me. I would be unable to state one fact about the place, not even its capital city. I shall have to change post offices to avoid any future embarrassing questioning about my Central American adventures.

The ‘staycation’ has become a fact of life, for us and for others and really there is nothing to be ashamed of about it. Boasting about foreign travel seems vulgar these days; we just don’t want people from other countries to stay at home. There is so much to be said for not going abroad, the most obvious plus being the avoidance of airports, but too there’s no need to pack suitcases or put the pets into kennels or leave precious plants to their own devices.

A day out in, say, the Glens of Antrim or even the Liffey Valley Shopping Centre can be more restorative than two trans Atlantic flights. Staycations have the added advantage of getting to know your own country and in the process seeing it through the eyes of strangers. For this reason I am irresistibly impelled to follow brown signs. Sadly, these days this can mean being led to many an auction in waiting.

Proceeding up the Main Street in Naas the other day, I had to make a sharp right turn seduced, although the sign was blue, by the invitation to take ‘The Naas Tourist Trail’. A sign spoke of the Norman origins of the town of Naas, the word itself meaning Gathering of the Kings. This was promising so we strolled into a narrow and winding street; on one side old walls sheltered the remains of St. David’s Castle, then what seemed to be the ruins of a church, and at the end the charming sight of a lovingly tendered private garden around a cottage.

We looked, admiringly, at the, horticultural display wondering at its existence because the light that should have nurtured it was cut out by an edifice of rusting metals, concrete and broken glass that seemed to lean from the other side of the street. Over the whole a monstrous crane pointed at the sky. This abandoned structure had been intended as a shopping centre, but out of what greed and stupidity was this building ever permitted in the first place, towering over the medieval lane? Are planning choices made with impunity?

Other towns have been more successful in safe-guarding heritage, so it would seem. Take, for example Westport in Co. Mayo; this always strikes me as a place deserving of its tourists. Although, ironically, it is now from where the much overused Botox is produced, it’s a place that has kept its character and charm; there are plenty of interesting places to eat, local crafts are everywhere, there are galleries, book shops, fresh fish on sale (and this can’t be said about every sea-side town in Ireland), a wonderful fruit and vegetable shop, many a brown sign and cleverly the grasping fingers of the supermarket chains are not in evidence.

Westport does have a superb location, and was one of the few planned towns in Ireland, designed in the 18th century by James Wyatt, but its custodians strike me as deserving praise. Even the cinema and leisure centre have been slotted in with discretion. Film going and indoor sports facilities are important activities in a country with a dismal climate which incidentally begs the question; why has it been so difficult to see the marvellous ‘The Artist’ in rural Ireland and why do we have to be denied the chance to see so many films of quality? The good news for film lovers in this country is that the Light House cinema in Dublin’s Smithfield has re-opened. Now there’s a destination for a day out.

It is 20 years since a garden restoration grant prompted us to open our gardens to the public, assured that the visitor numbers would run into thousands. This was not to be, and in one year, we welcomed just 60 visitors through the gates. Living in a border county where destinations for days out are few, it strikes me that the zeitgeist is now right for entrepreneurial people to provide such attractions and yes, garden openings must be high on the list.

We staycationers don’t ask for much; perhaps a cultural experience or even just a pleasant place to linger with a cup of tea on offer. Costa Rica, now where exactly is that?

Insider View - on Doing Things Differently

Lucy Madden on doing things differently these days in the gardens at Hilton Park.

In a crepuscular gloom I am trying to plant onions while listening with (hard to conceal) irritation to a lecture, delivered in barely understandable Pidgin English, on – of all things – Pythagoras. It’s only necessary to show very intermittent interest as the speaker, a mathematics graduate from Chile, has enough enthusiasm about his subject for both of us.

Earlier in the day I had to listen to a dissertation on pig-breeding, almost indecipherable, from another Spanish speaker anxious to practise his language skills. The previous day precious gardening time had been taken up by the reading of a story written for children by the Chilean mathematician; he read to me, sotto voce, and at a snail’s pace, perhaps because the subject was a snail.

Welcome to the world of woofers. My world. Or so it has become since the ancient practice of hiring gardeners and grounds men in exchange for a wage has become so undoable. For years circumstances made it possible for us to employ Irish people to work in exchange for wages.

Alas, changing times have for the moment put a halt to that and so into the spotlight has stepped the Workaway. The woofer – or one who exchanges five hours of labour daily for the benefits of a cultural experience with bed and meals thrown in, (but no money being exchanged) – is attaining (and here my evidence is only empirical) a certain ubiquity.

I have even been told that in certain parts of the country a code for the treatment of woofers is being circulated; in other words, one mustn’t ‘spoil the market’ by being too friendly with the lads and lassies who for a mutually beneficial experience, throw away caution to arrive on our doorsteps from places all over the globe.

This ‘how to treat a woofer’ list is said to include instructions on restricting the time spent eating with the family as in ‘lunch only, breakfast and dinner to be consumed apart’. It recommends, apparently, that all social intercourse must cease after 6 pm with the woofers restricted to their own areas. If it sounds rather cheerless, then it is.

My view is that if you accept a stranger into your home you are committed to treat the person as a member of your own family, even when you are stretched to the limit of endurance (and this is a personal experience) by sharing your table with a person wearing a black wife-beaters vest with visible underarm growth.

Tolerance in these matters is easier said than done when one is some decades away from the lottery of youthful shared space; my generation just did not have the experiences of the gap year that brings the wandering gapper, presumably, into situations of intimacy with strangers in foreign lands. I have had no previous familiarity with the underwear of people of the Mediterranean that today festoons our washing line nor am I used to finding the bathroom door locked when I want a bath and from within the sounds of splashing is a background to the Australian news relayed from a computer.

Yes, I have had a privileged life this far, and there is much to be gained from the company of strangers, but you do need to cultivate a relaxed attitude when, as we do, three generations and a handful of linguistically challenged visitors share the same roof.

For some of the family the experience can have unexpected consequences: my 7 year old grandson, familiar with hirsute Spaniards, met an ageing and paying English guest on the stairs and, sternly contemplating his facial hair (that curious sprouting on the cheekbones once known as ‘buggers’ grips) asked “Are you Spanish?”

Why these people, the woofers, submit themselves to the vagaries and possible cruelties of strangers is another matter. It seems to me that many of them have been damaged by experiences back home, they mostly have a story that eventually is told and it involves escaping from something. Others are just looking to improve their language skills or learn a little about another country.

With a few exceptions, we have been privileged to meet and hopefully make lifelong friends with some delightful young people. We have also in recent years, through their skills, been able to maintain a large garden and amenity grounds, which would otherwise have reverted to jungle, and if it means making a few sacrifices, then overwhelmingly it is worth it.

Besides, if the cosmopolitan atmosphere in the house ever gets too much for this old grump, she can take herself off and do a workaway in some foreign part, and far away.

Insider View - on Saturation

Lucy Madden reflects on the damage that copy cat operations can cause – and suggests that many events in Ireland (including festivals) may be at saturation point, or beyond

We’ve all seen the photograph, two celebrities arriving at a party and – shock, horror – they are wearing the same outfit. Naturally, they are putting a good (lifted) face on the situation, but inwardly war has been declared. The knives are out for the hapless designer.

This is not a situation with which I am familiar, as I am neither a celebrity nor have I ever worn an ensemble that anyone else is likely to choose. But the emotion of surprise that one’s life choices are increasingly likely to be replicated is one that I am noticing more and more.

A few years ago, my daughter moved into a new house and, being a keen gardener, set to work to create something horticultural at her back door. Since she had a bird’s eye view from her first floor of her neighbour’s garden, and vice versa, she was a little surprised to see that every time she dug a bed or put a plant into the ground, an exact replica appeared in next door’s garden, down to the smallest detail.

At first, she felt the situation was flattering but by the time the project was complete, the projects were complete, and two identical gardens somehow lacked the charm of an individual creation. The neighbour could be deemed to have been a garden stalker. I know, too, of a family who designed their own house and found within a couple of years that somebody had bought a plot of land on the hillside above theirs, and built a house, similar in every way to their own.

The accident of a shared dress at a party is just that, bad luck, but the proliferation of copy-cat projects has to be to the detriment of most endeavours. Friends who ran a successful off-licence were shocked to find a competitor opening a few hundred yards away.

We are a very small country with all too few people having disposal income and it strikes me that if someone comes up with a good idea that it’s just not on to duplicate their project on their doorstep. A flower shop opened in our local town and seemed to thrive, that is until a similar shop appeared a few doors down. The result, of course, was that they both closed within the year. It seems that you only have to be seen to be doing well and somebody else will get in on the act, your act, your doorstep. Much more would be achieved if people would work together, instead of these endless divisions.

I have been told that there are three farmers’ markets in a certain northern town with a population barely able to support one market and this can’t be construed as healthy competition but just foolishness. Why can’t they all work together?

You can argue that replicating a successful business is the dynamic of a free market but whatever happened to common sense? We are suffering from saturation. The retail sector has been saturated over recent years to such an extent that in every town and city abandoned premises line our streets. We as a country have been saturated with hotels and now those who have survived must compete with the rock-bottom prices offered by the NAMA hotels.

And then there are festivals, in danger of saturation. Here I must declare an interest as a mother-in-law of a festival organiser who has struggled to put on an event for the last five years that has proved to be very popular in spite of a low budget, obscure location and bad weather.

Imagine the shock, then, to discover that two weeks after the proposed date of this year’s festival, a few miles up the road a neighbour is hosting a festival that includes some of the same artists that were to have performed at our festival. What is going on?

What is going on is that there is a level of desperation combined with a vacuity of ideas and the notion that you can have a piece of someone else’s cake. But with a small footfall there are only so many hotels, shops, farmers’ markets and festivals that the population can support.

And, let it never be forgotten, that when over-supply has put a stop to what is creative and authentic in our society, we’ve still got to look each other in the face.

Insider View - on Eating

Lucy Madden wonders at the theatrical experience that eating at the World’s Best Restaurant offers – and puts in a plea for more simple, authentic food for visitors to rural Ireland, based on ingredients grown in the local area.

Overheard on a London street: “What is your national dish?” The answer came immediately. “Tomato tart with a garlic sauce”. Which country was in discussion I have never identified but reading a little publication “Favourite traditional Irish dishes” I wondered why I have never come across ‘Cockle soup’ or ‘Urney Pudding’ or ‘Balnamoon Skink’ in my travels around the country.

Of course we do have our traditional dishes and very good, if not very numerous, they are too. Irish stew, Dublin Coddle, Barm Brack, Champ and Colcannon, they can’t be rivalled.

As is often, but perhaps not often enough, pointed out we do too have the most wonderful ingredients. Some years ago a food writer friend told me she had been asked to produce a food map for the country but had had to refuse because she couldn’t find enough to put on it.

There has been a sea change over the last couple of decades, no doubt, but will we be able to resist the rise of the theatrical chef with his state-of-the-art foamers, dry ice chambers and ionisers? Do we want that kind of cooking and, as important, do we want it done badly?

Recently I had the great good fortune to eat at Noma in Copenhagen, voted for the third year running the World’s Best Restaurant. Here the word theatre springs to mind with 22 courses presented and explained by different waiters over a four hour period.

At roughly course number 12 my attention to the detail started to evaporate and it was an experience that one might contemplate repeating only after a lengthy interval, nevertheless what is remarkable about chef Rene Redzep’s exceptional cooking is the focus on foraged food, much of which the eater is being introduced to for the first time. Unless, of course, reindeer moss seasoned with cep, juniper essence and pine shoots are part of your daily diet.

At Noma presentation is dramatic; at one stage a live shrimp jumped out of a jar of ice and this we were bidden to eat; pickled and smoked quail’s eggs were presented in what looked like a biscuit tin.

Looking back, a little bewildered, my favourite course was crispy pork skin which appeared to be clamped to an intensely flavoured blackcurrant jelly. Later we saw sheets of this blackcurrant preparation being ‘air dried’ when, after dinner we were shown around the kitchens by an enthusiastic young man, one of the 45 workers at the restaurant, who intends to return to his native Dublin and open his own restaurant. Will it be run on the lines of Noma, I asked? The answer was a firm no.

It’s hard to imagine the sustainability of a restaurant run with this intensity and level of staffing and Noma may go the way of El Bulli, five times World’s best restaurant, which closed due to big losses accrued by the number of staff needed to produce chef proprietor Ferran Adria’s masterly dishes.

Nevertheless, these award-winning restaurants, while they last, have the power to attract numerous visitors to an area; I doubt we should have visited Copenhagen had we not had the booking at Noma, and this would have been a shame since it is a city of great charm and interest.

Noma’s influence has inspired a whole food culture based around foraging so it was at another restaurant, Restaurationen, that we were introduced to the delights of goutweed which, as was explained, is a ferocious weed and one that is rampant around my garden, I’m now glad to say. ‘Goutweed’ turns out to be ground elder, a leaf with a flavour a little reminiscent of aniseed that I now consume in various guises with the added advantage of weeding the flower beds at the same time.

All this begs the question; what is the best food? Good ingredients, for a start, but also service and value for money. I would argue that eating out isn’t just about the food, it’s also about ambience and fun and not being made to feel you are being looked down upon by an arrogant waiter. Chefs working outside their capability zone can produce horrid food too, complicated blobs of this and that and mysterious offerings in mini Kilner jars.

Some of the best food I have eaten has been at market stalls, or at beachside cafés, or in the houses of friends. It is sad that as you drive around rural Ireland today so much of the food on offer comes from the Far East. We all love a good ‘Chinese’ or ‘Indian’ but how many towns offer visitors what is authentic and what is found growing in the area?

We have marvellous ingredients growing on our doorsteps, some of the best meat and fish in the world and we don’t even need to tinker around with them too much. Even a little offering of goutweed wouldn’t go amiss.

Insider View - Doing Nothing

Turning her attention to the wisdom of ‘letting the hare sit’, Lucy Madden contemplates (among other things) the benefits of masterful inactivity.

Our summer, henceforth to be known as the monsoon season, has caused me to remember the words spoken by John Cleese in the film ‘Clockwise’; “it’s not the despair I mind, it’s the hope.” This philosophical reflection (attributed originally to Michael Frayn) strikes a deep chord as we seem now to have abandoned hope and as a consequence experience the relief that comes with it.

As Madam Bovary suffered “stale gusts of dreariness” so a resigned acceptance that the coming months are unlikely to have us lighting our barbecues or slapping on the sun tan lotion. Perhaps instead, as someone suggested, we should be gathering up the animals in pairs.

Enough of this, you may cry. We have to be positive. Florid with rage, I went into my bank the other day to complain about some new and seemingly unnecessary innovation that had been thrust upon me. The face behind the counter went white and tears came into the good lady’s eyes as she said “Don’t blame me. This is my first day back. I’ve been on sick leave for 10 weeks with a breakdown. I hate the banks, too.”

Having then riposted that at least she had a job (and got that off my chest), we then bonded over the counter and consoled each other that the troubles of our country were not as bad as those of others. “And at least our economy does not depend on tourism.” She told me. That’s a relief then. A little bit of positivity there. No doubt we shall be told at the end of the year that the numbers of visitors 2012 was up, again, but the empirical evidence of my wanderings has revealed they are not to be seen.

For those, like this family, who will not be holidaying abroad this year, there has been a bewildering clash of opportunities to be festive and this has meant that round every corner a wet field, a tent and some loud music beckons you in. Festival overkill? I think so. And why, just when someone comes up with a really good idea for a festival, Turtle Bunbury’s History Festival at Lisnavagh in Co. Carlow, did it have to clash with the Hay Festival at Borris House in the same county? As one who would have like to attended both, torn by indecision, I visited neither.

Terry Leahy, for many years CEO of Tesco, has recently published ‘Management in 10 words’, a book that may have heart-sinking ramifications for those wearied by similar tomes but this is a book written by a man who knows what he is talking about and his precepts are set out simply. In 1979, when young Terry began working for Tesco, the company had one computer, known as ‘The Computer’ taking up one whole floor. Today Tesco is the world’s largest on-line food business.

Think what you like about Tesco and its detrimental effect on high streets and small producers, as I do, but Sir Terry is a man to whom it is worth listening. His book advocates a business model that is a formidable combination of embracing change in the form of technological and methodological advances but at the same time urges the value of staying with the core values of building up trust, of punctuality and politeness.

In our lemming-like rush over the last two decades for constant change and development which has largely been coupled with a rejection of the past, have we forgotten our core values? Have we become less pleasant? And what has happened to politeness? Sir Terry reserves contempt for politicians who argue that ‘doing nothing is not an option’ when in fact that may just be the best course.

The malarkey that is the Olympic Games is, to my reckoning, an example of what happens when a good idea can’t be left alone but has to be expanded and fiddled with until its core values are lost in the corporate behemoth that is currently upsetting many London residents.

Stay at home, take stock and do nothing. That’s my plan for the summer.

Insider View - Internet Reviews

Lucy Madden considers the advantages – and the perils – of the internet, especially in relation to a subject dear to our own hearts: ‘impartial’ online reviews...

My sister has a boyfriend – or to be more accurate – an ‘oldish manfriend’ who is an actor of some critical acclaim. Reviews for his plays, books and recitals are almost always favourable and indeed at an age when many of his contemporaries have hung up their scripts, a lot of work still comes his way. The problem is that before every appearance on stage he is physically sick with nerves, even after a lifetime on the boards. I am told that this is not unusual, but you might have thought he would have pulled himself together by now.

Easier to understand is his obsession with the occasional slight criticism that comes his way from reviewers, in spite of the overwhelmingly positive nature of their comments. He will chew over the negative remark, refer to it frequently and over time the slight will be exaggerated into an insult received, never to be forgotten, that bears little relation to the original comment.

Familiar territory, this. There was an occasion, some years ago, when a food critic referred to a dish I had cooked as being ‘rather bland’. I have remembered this with pain and self-flagellation down the years, forgetting compliments or other accolades given, but instead turning over the words ‘rather bland’ obsessively like a piece in a kaleidoscope. This fixation on criticism is bearable in the confines of my kitchen, but must be rather hard to bear in the global arena that is now the World Wide Web. While I resolutely refuse even to articulate the word ‘tweet’, let alone get involved in it, I am not so foolish as not to recognise the advantages – and the perils – of the internet.

The crime writer Roger J. Ellery, has been found to be posting rave reviews of his own novels on the Amazon website under an assumed name; not just this but rubbishing the work of his rivals. You can be sure that he is not alone in this pursuit – and it has transpired that commercial interests on Twitter can buy up fictitious approval ratings. Why does the hospitality free-for-all that is ‘TripAdvisor’ suddenly comes to mind?

Aficionados of this site claim that they can spot a review that is not genuine, written by the owner of the premises, or a mother or a friend, but I would make no such claim. It’s simply that when there are so many verified cases of fraudulent reviews, how can we believe anything we read on the internet? I have heard of a chain of hotels who asked all their employees, under assumed names, to submit a favourable review of their workplaces.

Conversely the spiteful can decimate a reputation by a malevolent comment. Like actors, we who work in hospitality are only as good as our last performance, and that is only dependent on the vagaries of those who sample our wares. And while we’re on the subject of that great impartial oracle of hospitality, TripAdvisor, there are a few points that need making. They are now canvassing accommodation providers to pay them a fee for an enhanced presence on their portal; impartiality, how are you?

For years they have listed our establishment as ‘Hilton Park Hotel’; three times we have written to them saying that they are misleading their surfers, three times they have ignored us. Just for interest, the other day, I tried searching for us via their home page, of course under the ‘hotel’ listings, but drew a blank, in spite of narrowing the search geographically. Finally, we emerged under their Bed And Breakfast listings. Who is misleading who?

A long standing American client wrote a paean of praise to this establishment, which was posted for about three weeks and then unceremoniously removed. On enquiry she was told that they reserved the right to remove reviews that might mislead their followers. We can only presume they thought we had written the review ourselves.

So what is the most reliable guideline when choosing a place to visit? It has to be that old favourite, word of mouth.

Insider View on Manners

Lucy Madden considers the question of Manners - and, warning that The Gathering’s returning diaspora may cast a more critical eye on us than we might like, hopes that we can remain a mannerly country

During a visit to Berlin at the end of last year my son visited the prison, now open to the public that the Stasi, the secret police, had used to incarcerate their victims. The guides are chosen for having some connection with people who had been prisoners there so necessarily their accounts of prison life are authentic and often emotional.

The group with my son listened in silence to their guide and when she had finished speaking, the quiet that ensued was broken by a long, loud sound. A young Spaniard was breaking wind, clearly making no attempt to hide it. At this rudeness, the guide rebuked him angrily, but he and his friends shrugged shoulders and walked away, leaving her in tears.

This account reminded me of a visit some years ago to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam; its few rooms so redolent of the horrors that had occurred there that most visitors must be moved to silence. Not so a man, English speaking, who was there on that day with us.

He strode through the house, sneering at the memorabilia and loudly voicing his anti-Semitic spleen. On this occasion other visitors remonstrated with him, but this only served to encourage him and were it not for his eloquent delivery, we might have thought him mad rather than disrespectful and rude.

Unacceptable behaviour but isolated incidences, you might say; but are they? Everyone is sensitive about the history of their country and few would deny that it behoves visitors to respect this. Mostly they do, but now that we are beginning the year of The Gathering, perhaps we should prepare ourselves for the returning diaspora to cast a more critical eye over the country than we might anticipate or like.

What, for example, is to be said about the sad state of our towns and villages with their empty premises and ghost estates, the rise in crime or indeed, the flag issue in Northern Ireland? Whichever way this influx goes, we must be prepared for a critical assessment, like it or not.

One aspect of Irish life that has survived, just, the trials and tribulations of recent years is the friendliness, so often attested to on these pages, that is encountered all over this island. What has changed, though, is the attitude of the customer who expects more value for his money...

When we started working in hospitality, some decades ago, there was a more defined etiquette about arrival and departure times. Just try arriving before 5pm in France! Nowadays visitors will turn up very early in the day and departure is a looser arrangement, usually to get more value for a one night stay.

Today guests are more likely to bring their own drinks into our reception rooms, ask about bringing their own wine for dinner, (this in spite of us paying for a wine licence) or litter the hall with the debris of their fitness regimes. You see this shift in behaviour everywhere with people in restaurants clamped to their mobile phones or you may sit on public transport in the pervading aroma of your neighbour’s burger or Chinese take-away not to speak of the stench of popcorn in the cinema and rustle of crisp packets at the crucial moment.

Then there is, no doubt, an increase in the number of visitors who stalk the land in search of something about which to complain. One of the worst offenders known to me is an elderly relation whose mission in life is to find fault. This is a man who presumed to tell Michel Roux in his restaurant that he served his wine too cold.

He is the guest that everyone dreads for whom nothing is ever good enough and will say so, no sotto voce for him, sparing nobody’s feelings. He travels the world addressing everyone in his path in English and when he is not understood, repeats himself but louder. I would like to think that he and his ilk is a dying breed and that travellers act in an orderly and appreciative way in the countries of others.

We may be tried by our guests but must avoid being gratuitously rude. We are still a long way from the rudeness encountered in New York, where a friend asked a policeman for directions and was told “Go get yourself a map, grandma.” Nor is it likely that a hotel guest would be told, as was a friend of ours in the south of England, that she “smelled of smoke” by the sommelier.

I like to feel this could not happen here and we remain the mannerly country we always were, but we must prepare to be tested, as tested we may be, for returning Gatherers may cast a colder eye over us than we might like.

Insider View on the elderly

Never one to shy away from unspoken truths, this month Lucy Madden considers the elderly...

The hirsute and not-so-easy-on-the eye racing correspondent John McCririck (72) is suing Channel 4 for alleged ‘ageism’ in replacing him with the younger and undisputedly popular ex-jockey Clare Balding (41). The manner of his dismissal in the jungles of television is not for discussion here, but does seem to have followed a familiar pattern of lack of manners or consideration.

But that John McCririck thinks that he is entitled to his television career until such time as he decides to end it, is clearly ridiculous. Whether we like it or not, there are age specific activities and the passing years can sometimes render us obsolete in our chosen vocations, even if it suits the lawyers to think otherwise.

Travelling recently to see a medical specialist for a potentially serious condition, we were discussing the preferred age of this expert, hoping for neither extreme youth with not enough experience, nor for the possible prejudices and lack of up-to-date knowledge of an older person. Ageist? You bet.

The hoped-for decade that was decided on was a person somewhere in the middle forties, and this was how it turned out to be. On another occasion my husband saw his prospective surgeon, no spring chicken, and described him as ‘red-faced, out-of-condition and possibly a drinker’ an impression not likely to inspire confidence as you go under the knife.

The fact that an impression can be misleading is beside the point, what matters is the perception. And when it comes to working in hospitality, a career that demands commitment and stamina, those involved need to be fit, to be seen to be fit and by definition, youngish.

We stopped the other day at a small restaurant outside Belfast and our order was taken by a person I took to be an octogenarian who shuffled from the direction of the kitchen. My first reaction was admiration that such a one as elderly as he should still be in employment, but when a grizzled and trembling hand put down our plates I wanted to grab his burden from his clutches and sit him down for a rest. He looked exhausted and exuded the impression that he didn’t want us there. He may have been somebody’s grandfather helping out, but he may have been a member of the ‘I refuse to retire’ brigade.

That many people who would previously have been retired still have to work is well documented, and for the self-employed burdened with bank borrowings there may be no way out, but that weary face that hovered over table would have been better contemplating a sunset elsewhere. Clearing tables should have been in his past. No-one wants to pay to feel guilty. Yet here is the crux; we may want a Mary Berry supervising the gateaux, but do we want to be served by a shuffling old curmudgeon? It is no coincidence that the top restaurants tend to hire the young and beautiful to wait at their tables.

Lurking around the edges of employment, as all employers must know, are the spectres of regulation; torments of equality and rights, health and safety, each that has eroded so much entrepreneurialism, spontaneity and fun from our lives. Few would dare argue in favour of discrimination by race, gender or disability, but the ageing process has specific issues that won’t go away by pretending they don’t exist.

As one who is now in an age group often referred to as ‘elderly’ (67) and having thus been for some decades existing in the twilight of invisibility, I have long since abandoned any ambition to run a play group, be a pop star or a pole dancer. I am too old for the Dream Factory.

The good news is that a recent report confirmed what we all knew that women in their fifties and sixties are more empathetic than any other section of the population and this opens up new possibilities. We should move more centre stage; there are roles for women ‘of a certain age’ that we can do better than others. This is common sense.

The fact that John McCririck thinks that it is his ‘right’ to cling on to his lucrative career when his employers, and by implication his viewers, no longer see him as fit for purpose is beside the point. In an age that is obsessed with ‘rights’, he may avail of the courts but he will never win over public opinion. If we don’t want to see this misogynistic Worzel Gummage on our screens, then so be it. If we want our restaurants and hotels to be staffed by those who are easy-on-the-eye then that’s just the way it is, like it or not.

Admittedly, there is an irony here as I find it offensive that our daily news is broadcast in the main by those who come with burgeoning breasts and blond hair extensions and I for one don’t want to hear about wars and tragedies from someone not old enough to have acquired a little gravitas. Perhaps there is a role here for someone like me?

Insider View on Opening a Restaurant

This month our intrepid thinker Lucy Madden considers the irresisistible force that so often lures the wrong people into opening a restaurant - and gives some excellent examples of the good and the bad

It is said that there are three things we all think that, given a chance, we could do well. I forget two of them but one, I know, is to run a restaurant. For myself, I know I could be a superb photographer or ballet dancer, given a good camera and some dancing lessons, but this is beside the point.

As for running a restaurant, a couple of years ago a friend of ours was unfortunate in not resisting his inclination in this direction. He knew how to do it, he insisted, in spite of having no experience that might assist him in his endeavour apart from a love of good food.

He rented a premises in the main street of a busy town and hired an interior decorator to turn the place into a state of the art setting, hired a young chef and constructed a menu that was an exercise in box ticking; fresh ingredients, the promise of local food, some fusion influences, traditional Irish dishes with a modern twist. You get the picture. Mistake number one was the launch where the food on offer was sushi. Hardly a showcase for local produce. Within two years the restaurant closed and the premises remain empty to this day.

It’s hard to be precise in pin-pointing what went wrong when much seemed so right. But had our friend taken a walk around the corner of his trendy eatery he would have seen a very thriving little business where getting a table means booking well in advance.

The décor here is drab, the tables too close together but the food, which is Greek Turkish, is fresh and authentic and above all, reasonably priced. There is no chef ‘showing off’ in the kitchen dabbing spots and swirls on to plates, and no feeling of condescension from the staff that you can experience in certain restaurants.

Our friend had never crossed the threshold of this place and this was his first mistake since seeing what, and what does not, succeed as an enterprise should be part of the market research. Success or failure may depend on one aspect overlooked. Years ago I went to the launch of a restaurant in London and a fellow guest turned to me and whispered: “The lighting here is far too bright. It makes us all look like phantoms. No-one will want to come here.” And they didn’t and soon another restaurant put up the Shut sign.

Growing up in the 1950s, as I did, restaurants as we know them scarcely existed. I remember the excitement of being taken to a café to eat beans on toast. Hotel dining rooms were the option for those who wanted to eat out and the experience was so dismal that it was undertaken out of necessity only.

It was not until the 1960s that we began to think of food as pleasurable, and the following decades have seen an explosion of gastronomic venues. Today eating out has been described as ‘the new shopping’ but this is to describe the term loosely to include amateurs cooking in sheds on cliff tops, pop-ups in the suburbs, and a proliferation of take-aways.

In spite of the excellence of the few, the mystery remains as to how some terrible restaurants remain in business and, with the certainty of offending an entire population, my experience is that the further north you go in this country, the more likely you are to encounter bad food. My worst culinary catastrophes have mostly been encountered north of the border, in places that admittedly sit alongside restaurants of excellence, but the wonder is that they can co-exist.

Horses for courses, one might exclaim, and if you are not paying much you can’t expect much in the way of quality, but very often bad food is also expensive. Why do we put up with it? Variously I have encountered cinnamon sprinkled thickly over a salad, a rice pudding that made an appearance as a pile of long-grain rice, a Caesar salad with no dressing.

Even at the Titanic Centre, where they should know better, the ‘spiced soup’ was so salty my companions could not eat it and the bread was stale. None of these experiences were cheap and even that would not have excused the crassness of the experience.

To anyone thinking of opening a restaurant I would say, do a lot of market research. A good place to begin would be the Eastern Seaboard in Drogheda. It starts with many disadvantages; it is hard to locate, situated on the edge of an unattractive housing estate and you could walk past it many times without a second glance.

When it opened a few years ago I read a review of it that was so enthusiastic I thought it must have been written by a relative. Today it is a favourite destination of mine and many other people. That it should thrive in such an unlikely location is a testament to that elusive skill, the art of making people happy.

Insider View - The G8

When the news reached our house that the G8 talks were to be held this year in Enniskillen, my initial reaction – joy that such an auspicious gathering would be on our doorstep – was replaced by a worry about décor.

The chosen hotel has a fine site on the edge of the largest inland waterway in these islands, a championship golf course and no doubt has passed all the checks necessary to host the world’s great and good. I have not stayed there, but I have eaten in the restaurant, although admittedly not recently, and noticed with a shudder that those responsible for the furnishings shared a propensity beloved by so many of our country’s designers, namely a love of aubergine.

You find this colour daubed on walls, curtains, furnishings of all kinds, up and down the country. It does nothing for the spirit. Some years ago I told a friend I was thinking of painting our kitchen a shade of purple. “We all go through that stage,” she said “But we quickly come out of it.”

Not quickly enough, alas, the interiors of our land of little sunshine are overly dependent on heavy reds, maroons and yes our friend the aubergine in all shades. There may well be people who like to sit in semi-darkness on banquettes of burgundy under walls festooned with flock wallpaper in mauve and gold but I would prefer something a little more Scandinavian. Now there is the spirit of the times. Let there be light.

One can argue that discussing taste is pointless because it is both cultural and subjective, but I would suggest that a ubiquity of colours cherished by the Victorians has little to do with our zeitgeist. Why are there places where we might instinctively feel we don’t want to be? Even the briefest study of the principles of Feng Shui comes up with an explanation for this. A good example of design features that contravene the tenets of this ancient wisdom is the so called Clinton building in Enniskillen which, because of where it is, might just catch the passing glance of a visiting member of the G8.

This building is in the intersection of two roads, has sharp angles in its design and yes, one large wall is painted purple. Will this building catch the approving eye of our visitors if they are allowed out to see the locality of Enniskillen? More likely that they will be drawn to Georgian architecture in the form of Castle Coole or the 16th century Castle in the town. The Clinton building does not beckon one in. Billy Connolly said that members of the royal family must think that every building smells of fresh paint; I hope that G8 visitors won’t think our national colour is purple.

There is a view I have often heard voiced that while we excel in oral skills in this country, we have much to learn when it comes to the visual. Planners and designers have much to answer for. In neighbouring Co. Cavan, where possibly G8 visitors may stray, there is a building in progress that makes you wonder what our planners have in mind. It sits in a hollow below the junction of a motorway and an exit road, thus looked down on two sides by passing traffic.

It is a substantial house, so large sums of money are involved, but it would seem to contravene all the rules that require building approval, sustainability, aesthetic, accessibility and above all health and safety. As this property burgeons, two members of my own family have been stymied by planning decisions in their attempts to develop tourist businesses.

In one case the application was halted by a question over a porch on a doorway of a neglected schoolhouse that, it was hoped, could be refurbished into a tea-room. In the other case, a derelict and potentially dangerous farm building, it was proposed, was to be restored into a facility to entertain large groups.

Alas, by the time the planners, conservationists, heritage officers and architects had had had their say, the costs had escalated beyond reason and the project abandoned. This last building is a so-called ‘protected structure’ which cannot be altered without permission.

The reasons the government saw fit to safeguard the nation’s heritage by copper-fastening the rules on change are understandable, but when this means that impoverished owners (and I declare a personal interest in this) who strive to maintain their properties through a practical approach to their problems, are prevented from doing so by an inflexible bureaucracy that keeps a lot of people in salaried jobs, but stands in the way of genuine and more importantly, affordable attempts to preserve and make use of existing buildings that would otherwise fall to the ground.

It makes you want to open the window and shout ‘I’m as mad as hell and I won’t put up with it anymore.’ Either that, or leave the country.

Insider View on The Gathering

This month our intrepid thinker Lucy Madden wonders about the longterm value of The Gathering - and has some excellent ideas of her own to put forward

Local children hover to catch the unwary with a request to ‘buy a line’ as a card is produced with a figure pointing forwards as if recruiting for a war. I see the words ‘three-legged race’ and somewhere at the bottom of the page ‘The Gathering’ is mentioned.

“Where is the money going?” I ask, anxious to escape. “Some of it to the school,” I am told. One must assume that this means that we are being asked to sponsor a gathering of the three-legged in aid of some piece of playground equipment or the like; nothing wrong with that, I am used to sponsoring, if forced, other people’s walks along the Great Wall of China, or bicycling through Provence, but it’s the ubiquity with which this word ‘gathering’ has become so all-embracing and is beginning to infuriate.

I must confess to being psychologically unsuited to be present at any gathering, large or small and this includes family weddings, school reunions, political rallies, AGMs and every other occasion where people who normally choose not to meet are brought together.

Worst of all are certain social gatherings; how I agree with the writer Craig Brown who said that ‘dinner and party’ are two words that shouldn’t be in the same sentence. Let that be; clearly that view is not shared by many others.

There are those who speak most eloquently and enthusiastically about The Gathering. President Obama found his Irish roots here and others will doubtless do so. The idea of local communities inviting Irish émigrés back to see the places where their antecedents lived (and often left) is a fine one, but the website Ireland Reaching Out (IrelandXO) which tells Americans that “When people like you arrive in Ireland, we not only want to make sure somebody is there to meet you locally, but also to make sure they have the training necessary to give you quality advice on your locality.” arouses my suspicions.

The last person you want to meet on a holiday is a ‘trained’ windbag as an escort. I sense the dead hand of bureaucracy reaching out. And here too is the rub; what motivation will the invitees see behind this call to the homeland? The benefits may well be social and cultural, but it will be hard to avoid the thought that the begging bowl is out.

Besides, many of those who left did so out of necessity and may feel angry that they are now being asked back to support a failed economy. Some years ago we received a letter from a charity asking for a straight donation that would avoid the obligation to make up a party, donate a gift for an auction, drive for miles and spend the evening shuffling around a hotel ballroom in aid of fund raising. Perhaps the Irish government would have been better to have asked its emigrants for say, a $10 donation to help us out of our difficulties.

Readers may find this attitude churlish and kill-joy, call it the Gabriel Byrne syndrome, possibly even influenced by my dislike of Ann Enright’s novel of the same name, but I find it hard to dispel the thought that somehow The Gathering was the wrong way to go.

It feeds into the notion that Ireland is being branded as an Oirish Theme Park, and we don’t need to do that. Denmark, for example, has reinvented itself as a destination for foodies. The allure of its television detectives may have something to do with it too.

It’s hard to imagine a re-branding of the country as a Land of the Vikings would have a similar effect in attracting visitors. The newly opened Abba museum in Sweden will surely bring in more tourists than if the country announced it was to be The Land of the Cool Blond.

Supporting enterprises that will provide visitors with an interesting, pleasurable and most importantly, authentic experience is far more likely to bring in the tourists than any spurious notion that a party is going to take place.

A good example of this, mentioned before on these pages, is the Great Western Greenway that I visit frequently. It is a cycle and pedestrian footpath that follows the old coastal railway line in Co.Mayo and is attracting a network of satellite businesses along its route.

Everything about it taps into the zeitgeist and on each visit I witness its increasing popularity. A ‘gathering’ is a once-off; an enterprise can grow and last for decades. Why not a museum celebrating our own musical achievers, U2 or the Pogues? Move over, Abba.

Insider View on TripAdvisor & Weddings By Website

This month our intrepid thinker Lucy Madden wonders once again about the merits (and otherwise) of TripAdvisor - and The Rule Book that seems to apply to the modern ‘wedding by website’...

A shocking event has been revealed by the vigilance of those who contribute to TripAdvisor. It has been reported that tea was ordered at a named hotel in the Midlands and was brought to the waiting guests by a waitress who (this is hard to believe) arrived with the teapot and a separate tray bearing the teacups at the same time.

Apparently there was no space on the table for the two items! You can imagine, perhaps, the upset this caused, and were it not for the revelation reaching the internet this disturbing lapse of professionalism might never have come to our attention. I imagine the offending waitress was given her marching orders.

No doubt TripAdvisor has sent many a traveller to a satisfactory destination but it has, let’s admit it, provided a forum for any self-important twerp to make trivial, but damning, observations about people and places struggling to provide hospitality.

A couple who recently visited Ireland from Scotland wrote no fewer than 47 different reviews on the website and, since they visited us, I know that their overwhelming response to everything depended on how much these two individuals were flattered by the hosts. Why is there not a website called say GuestAware where accommodation providers can write reviews warning others of tiresome travellers?

Even the destinations we love most are rarely perfect and it doesn’t take much, a stray cobweb or just a glance at the wrong time, to send a person in pursuit of a grievance to share it with the rest of the world. A hotel of great charm in which we stayed at in Copenhagen was written off on TripAdvisor because ‘the lift was too small’.

People, we know, write their own glowing reviews on TripAdvisor, and there are those who have the time to answer criticisms about their establishments, but the website has become burdensome for many and the overload of information tedious. Oh for the days when a sagacious editor monitored what appeared in print. Those days, alas, will not return.

Old Luddite I may be, but there is another disturbing development that the internet has thrown up. Happily I have not been asked to a wedding for some years. This all changed months ago when an email alerted me to the fact that a relative was plotting to do the deed this summer and a date was mentioned. So far, so good.

There was a time when a wedding invitation was made to look ‘inviting’ and you might have expected any invitation, come to that, to be framed in such a way that you could be tempted away from your fireside. All that, thanks to the internet, has changed. My relative and his spouse to be have set up a wedding website for information relating to their nuptials that my daughter has aptly renamed The Rule Book.

We are being summoned to a remote (and therefore expensive to get to) part of England. We have hosted three weddings at home for our children and on each occasion neighbours rallied to put up people who had to travel from afar. Today wedding guests are told to book in to a hotel. Good for the hotel trade but costly for the invitee.

The website then instructs the guests how everyone will be invited to a two hour reception, but only some are to be invited to a dinner, at what time you must order your taxi, how children are to be removed from the church if they are unruly, how they cannot attend the reception, the precise time you are expected to leave the premises and finally a large section of this overload of information is devoted to the presents the couple expect to receive.

How could any of this be deemed to be in the spirit of hospitality? Who in this busy world has the time or the inclination to read all the details of this proposed alliance? Add to the mix the rise in divorces and the fact that the last wedding about which I heard (but thankfully was not invited to) happened last September and by Christmas the wife had locked her new husband out of the family house and is now filing for divorce. I view these wedding capers with great cynicism. The World Wide Web is a wonderful and mysterious and permanent presence in our lives, but it has the capacity for great harm, and it would be prudent to be aware of and resist some of its excesses.

Trip Advisor is both a blessing and a tyranny but I can find no merit in a wedding website. Photographs of the (now) happy couple only serve to annoy when I consider how impoverished family members are being invited to fork out hundreds of pounds to attend a ceremony that appears to be run on very tight lines and with little scope for merriment. I for one shall not be buying a new hat.

Insider View - Is The Flipping Top Table Asleep?

This month Lucy Madden reflects on a number of strange and worrying goings-on in Ireland - and asks “Is the flipping top table asleep?”

This anguished and heartfelt cry voiced on a recent Joe Duffy programme about the state of our country would be echoed by many. What is going on? There is distress on so many different levels and I see at first hand (in my own family) the withering effects of unemployment, negative equity, minimal social welfare and little prospect of change.

Yet visitors from Dublin report that the shops, bars and restaurants teem with life and the conclusion from this border region is that this is a very divided country. In rural Ireland there is genuine suffering, and none of it made easier against the backdrop of the Anglo-Irish tapes, the tone and language of which should come as no surprise in a country where some who are patently dishonest are repeatedly voted back into office.

The causes and nature of our current predicament may be complex, and the sufferings unevenly divided, but individual pain is increased by witnessing the witless wasting of money by state bodies who should, we might expect, know better.

My granddaughter, aged 8, recently won a place in the final of a national competition run by Health and Safety and featuring safety on farms. Her prize was to attend a workshop along with the other winners, of whom there were around 70. This would have been reward enough but no, each child was then presented with no less than €80 each, an unnecessary amount for a child of that age and a complete waste of taxpayers’ money.

This gave me a familiar waft of depression that I felt when reading about the ‘Greening of the Globe’ on St. Patrick’s Day. Coupled with the incredible waste of money (although probably not ours) this tacky venture can have done little to encourage the concept of Ireland as a green and pleasant land –and isn’t this concept the way to go?

Electrically greening some of the world’s most iconic buildings (including, ironically, the Museum of Nature in Canada) can only reinforce the notion that this is a nation of cowboys and spendthrifts and realistically, is anyone going to see a photograph of Richard Branson with his beard dyed green and think “Aha! Ireland looks a great spot for a holiday.” Leo Varadkar may assure us that The Gathering is “picking up pace’ and so it may be, but it is not obvious in this part of Ireland. Nor have I heard it mentioned on that barometer of Irish life, the aforementioned Joe Duffy programme, with the talk more likely to feature the pain of living in a country where public servants seem more obstructive than helpful.

There is one area of excellence in Irish life, however, to which I personally and unreservedly can attest. Last autumn I was diagnosed with breast cancer since when I have been treated at three hospitals, the Mater, Beaumont and Cavan and at each place I have met nothing but kindness, speed and efficiency.

Although I had health insurance my G.P. advised me to go public and I have not regretted this for a minute. We complain about our health service but my experience of cancer treatment has been over-whelming. I marvel at the calibre of people who work in this area and if only every school-leaver could spend some time shadowing the wonderful doctors, nurses and receptionists that I’ve had the good fortune to encounter in those hospitals, so many lessons would be learned, not least how to deal with the public. Just for a start, as important in the social welfare offices as in hospitality – (and altogether now) Smile.

Insider View on Deception

Lucy Madden considers ‘deception’, in various intriguing forms.

In a desperate but undisputedly mean-spirited way I booked a lunch-time table for twelve at a restaurant of which I am particularly fond and visit as often as I can. When our party arrived the expression on the face of front-of-house filled me with remorse and shame for our party of twelve consisted of two adults and ten children and I had omitted to reveal the fact when making the booking.

The non-adults in our group were of the variety that eat like stick insects, demand jug after jug of watered cordial and scatter Crayola shards over the tablecloth. Under the table a treacherous layer of discarded food, paper and bits of crayon will gather.

When not anointing their chairs with a coating of grease, these undesirables will hover around the toilets or indulge in criminal activity around the bowl of chocolates waiting to be dispensed to departing guests who will have eaten up and paid up. My daughter and I will have done our best to restrain these anti-social beings but, bless, they are children and we all know what they can be like. Where is Nanny McPhee when we need you?

When settling our rather small bill, I asked our host if I should have confessed to the presence of these desperadoes when making the booking. I didn’t need to ask. He was struggling to put it politely. “If it had been the evening and you had mentioned the presence of this number of children I should have said that we were booked out.” And, mumbling apologies, I ushered our miscreants away. If I had had a tail, it would have been firmly between my legs.

“Children welcome.” Should these two words be in the same sentence? There is little, or nothing, to be gained from the presence of the under-twelves save for the doting parents and even they are probably wishing their little darlings were happily and safely occupied elsewhere.

In public spaces children are mostly a nuisance, even to those who profess, like me, to enjoy their company, but the truth is that we adults like our recreation time in a child-free zone and this is where the dilemma arises for service providers. The fact is that adults come with children and they need servicing too.

And if one wants to introduce the young mind to something a little more elegant than your average greasy spoon, they deserve, on occasions, an introduction to the finer things of life. Proper food is one of them and chicken nuggets and chips don’t cut the mustard.

So, as one who regularly escorts large groups of children on outings, subterfuge becomes necessary. But I am not alone. It plays an ever-increasing part in our lives and we are sometimes the victims. There was a time when a wedding fee was applicable for locations.

Today it can happen that a group booked in under normal circumstances and, presumably, for normal activities anticipated by the hosts - walking the countryside, lounging with books, drinking, over-eating, indulging in the pleasures of the bedroom - can subtly transmogrify into something else.

Suddenly the party are wearing what looks like their best clothes. A woman will appear in a long white dress. Two cars arrive. Out of one steps a person holding what looks like camera equipment. Out of the other comes a stranger holding a book or a file. All at once the party is gathered in the garden and a wedding is taking place.

Perhaps one should not mind this kind of stratagem when a marriage is planned in these difficult times because it is not exactly disrupting anyone in the same way as smuggling children in to fill seats that bigger spenders might otherwise occupy, but all the same it doesn’t seem quite right.

It reminds me of a farm building that was erected overlooking my brother’s garden. Gradually, over the months, a window or two, then three and more would appear and then a door, and over a period of time the agricultural barn was transformed into a residence, and not one for farm animals. I am reminded of the advice I was once given that you can do anything you choose in this country, as long as you call it by a different name.

Doubtless deception is everywhere. Someone organising a major sporting event, which happens on a regular basis, was recently in touch with the local council for information on local amenities and visitor attractions only to find that the proposal was immediately classified as a ‘Gathering’ event and the information sent out was irrelevant to the participants and their followers.

Naturally, it is only a matter of time before we hear what a great success, in terms of visitor numbers, our ‘Gathering’ has been.

Insider View on Holidays

Lucy Madden considers those who admit that they do not like holidays - and there are more of them (us?) than you might think

A woman has rung in to a radio talk show and confessed that she doesn’t like holidays. You might react to this in the same way as if someone admitted to not liking sex - with a degree of incredulity – but no, it seems a lot of people share her view. I suspect I am one of them.

On the radio that day the floodgates were opened with listeners queuing to rid themselves of the burden of disliking holidays. There were a variety of reasons including boredom, insect attacks, fear of flying, boats or trains, dislike of strange food, travel sickness and homesickness.

This last malady was interesting because I had read a survey that concluded that a large number of holidaymakers felt homesick after just four days. Longings for one’s own bed, family and familiar surroundings are common in those who travel and presumably the further you go, the greater the longings for home.

This may go some way to explain the modern tendency, particular to those from the Antipodes and America, to whip out a computer within minutes of arriving at our house, in order that we can be shown the homelands of the visitor. Sometimes we are walked around their premises and sometimes this has led me to wonder why, if chez nous is so appealing, our guest has left it in the first place.

Travel broadens the mind, we are told, but not always. My aunt lived in India for 40 years but when I asked her how she got on with the Indian women, she replied “I’ve never met one, darling.” In all her years in that country, she had never tasted Indian cuisine, knew nothing of the culture and history and had never visited the Taj Mahal, in spite of living within hours of it.

It reminded me of the television footage of a group of tourists who, stepping off a plane returning from the Balearic Islands, were asked where they had been. Not one was able to locate their holiday location on a map, and a few did not know the name of the country where their holiday had been spent.

In my auntie’s case, her long sojourn abroad had only served to confirm the narrowing of her mind. I wonder in reality how much the possibilities of intellectual expansion have been thrown up by the advent of cheap air travel since the 1970s with the chance to spend ‘a long weekend’ in different cities abroad.

There is a tendency among those who flit around the globe frequently to regard themselves not as tourists, but as ‘travellers’, and not of the Romany kind. They are encountered at airports where they never queue in the departure lounge but sit reading until the masses have gone through. They distance themselves from the often inebriated packs who spill out of aeroplanes for short breaks by the sobriety of their clothes, the modesty of their luggage and the disdain on their faces.

Then there is another group, to which I belong, whose members are constantly rechecking their baggage for tickets and passports and hover nervously under the flight departure board. The whole process of the preceding security check, discarding clothes and shoes, has already confirmed the suspicion that staying at home is a far better option.

Yet somehow this option is viewed as an indicator of a dull mind. “But surely you want to travel?” one is asked. No account is taken of the overwhelming feeling of loneliness and insignificance that can overtake one when sitting in some foreign square as the alien crowds mill past murmuring in foreign tongues.

My sister and I once shared a sandwich on a train in Berlin and quickly became aware of the hostility gathering around us. It was only later we learned that eating is forbidden on public transport. How much simpler it is to be in a place where one knows the rules.

One’s own dear land has much to offer and besides, parts of it so resemble abroad that it makes travelling there unnecessary. You could argue that Dalkey is more like Naples than Naples is and swathes of our west coast (if you take the rain out of the equation) could be mistaken for other faraway beauty spots. A guest once told us that Monaghan was more beautiful than Tuscany. So what is wrong with staying at home? Who needs airport anxiety, blistered skin and portion control at dinner time?

A taxi driver in Belfast who specialises in tours of the places where ‘The Troubles’ took place disclosed recently that while he had had hundreds of foreign tourists he had never had anyone from southern Ireland. Here is an example of a mind broadening exercise available and one I can thoroughly recommend.

For those who really don’t like holidays, there is another course of action I can suggest and this is to tell all your friends that you are travelling abroad to a remote destination, then switch off all lines of communication and enjoy two weeks at home, unbothered by the outside world. It could be the first holiday you have ever enjoyed.

Insider View - Places Unlike Anywhere Else

This month Lucy Madden considers what an 80 year old friend calls ‘romantic Ireland’ - but, while mourning the passing of so much that was unique about this country, she also finds its spirit flourishing anew in unexpected places

Through a chance encounter on a beach in Co. Mayo we were recommended to visit a pizza restaurant run by three Frenchmen on a hill in Achill Island; a suggestion I would normally find easy to decline. Even the name ‘Pure Magic’ irritated. However, some hours later, and learning a lot about the geography of Achill in the process, we found a low stone structure housed a place that lived up to its name.

Essentially a centre for kite surfers, it was here that I was at last converted to the joys of pizza; those Frenchmen know what they are doing. The music of Django Reinhardt floated across a room brought alive by a collection of eclectic objects, where groups of guests lolled like contented turtles. It was like stumbling across a secret club; it was funky, jolly and most importantly, unlike anywhere else.

An 80 year old friend mourns the loss of what he calls ‘romantic Ireland.’ By this I guess he means not just a world of Celtic mysticism but one too of Gothic castles and empty landscapes, peopled by aristocrats and eccentrics and languid poets.

One is reminded of the story (possibly apocryphal) of a Countess visiting one of her tenants who lived in a cottage in some decrepitude and saying to her, “Don’t change a thing, it’s so you.” Yet it’s true that while the modernisation of Ireland in recent decades has improved life for so many people, it also swept away so much of what was unique about this country. People did come here because of the fun. This was to be had in villages, small shops and pubs all over the land, as has been chronicled by historian Turtle Bunbury in his Vanishing Ireland series.

The consequences of economic progress can be dire. The closure of so many rural pubs has surely led to lonely people sitting in their houses watching the X Factor and trundling a trolley around Lidl doesn’t replace the socialising pleasures of the village shop.

The bland sweep of uniformity, represented in the hospitality industry by the plethora of spas, golf courses and interminable blocks of bedrooms that had to be filled did away with much of the romance, and the armies of regulators who oversaw the process could not, or would not, remember about babies and bathwater.

There are few families who represent both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Ireland better than the Leslies of Glaslough, Co.Monaghan. A current exhibition at Monaghan Museum chronicles the story of this extraordinary family in a way that would have perhaps been unthinkable, for reasons of political correctness, a few years ago.

The Leslies have managed to produce several generations of eccentrics, current bearer of the title being the disco-dancing nonagenarian Sir Jack, who regales visitors to Castle Leslie with his tales of the past. You can argue that people who lived on large estates had the wealth and leisure and thus were privileged to live interesting lives, but those lives are part of our history.

Where else in the world other than at Huntingdon Castle in Co. Carlow would you be able to speak to the High Priestess of Isis who, as a child had tea with Yeats, or stand under the idiosyncratic ‘Jealous Wall’ at Belvedere, Co. Westmeath?

One of my favourite destinations is Westport House, not because of the Pirate playground or the train ride or any other of its myriad attractions, but because the history of the Browne family who still live there is so well preserved by photographs and memorabilia.

This is a family who can claim direct ancestry from Granuaile, the Pirate Queen who lived five centuries ago. Westport House was one of the first of Ireland’s estates to open to the public and, notwithstanding the struggles and concessions to commercialism that may not be to everyone’s taste, the current generation of the family is doing a great job in bringing the past to our attention.

If historic houses can only be maintained by crass compromises in attracting people to pay to visit, then so be it. It’s sad that so much of our heritage has indeed vanished in recent years but it seems it last we are valuing what is left.

There is nothing about ‘the Big House’ at Pure Magic, which is essentially a centre for wind-surfing and sea activities, but what it does have in common is that it’s a place where people are ‘doing their own thing’ and thereby creating a place unlike anywhere else.

Some years ago my husband asked a neighbour why he had a washing line erected across his farmyard from which hung a row of empty plastic oil cans. The farmer looked astonished to be asked the question. “Because a man has to have what no other man has,” was his explanation. And this attitude, in bagloads, is what we had in Ireland. Bring back the oddballs.

Insider View - Dear Santa

This month Lucy Madden enlists Santa’s help to make our green and pleasant land can become a more attractive place to live and to visit

Dear Santa,

It is many years since I last wrote to you, but there are just a few things I would like that might make life cheerier for a lot of us. A recent visit to the Four Courts has set me thinking. All I am really looking for is a wand. I want this to wave over our high streets and the first port of call, literally, will be the Quays in Dublin. Since this is the showcase of our capital city, the dismal rows of tawdry and downmarket shop fronts do nothing to bring a joyous upsurge of the spirit. They do it by the Seine, the Danube, beside the canals of Amsterdam: why not along the Liffey? By whose authority did this sad state of our riverfront come to pass?

Can you arrange a distribution of paint pots, as if the G8 were coming to town, and let there be a burgeoning of small shops selling things visitors want to buy, our crafts, antiques, our artisan foods, chocolates. American visitors told us recently that, having spent a day in Dublin, they thought they had seen all there was to see. Imagine saying that about London, Berlin or even Belfast?

And, Santa, may I have some seed packets for distribution? Outside our local town a patch of wild flowers was planted on the roadside and its exuberant blooms brightened an otherwise unremarkable stretch of road all summer long. Something similar would go a long way to improve our desolate pedestrianised spaces, the shopping malls and car parks.

You only need to look at the town of Westport where the planting in the town centre demonstrated that an artist was at work; people were jostling for position to photograph the beds. (This begs the question, incidentally, why garden designers are not given the accolades as ‘the artists’ that they can be and why their efforts are side-lined into ‘lifestyle’ sections of newspapers?) I have seen the work of these horticultural artists in a few parts of the country, where they have replaced the rows of garish bedding plants with distinguished displays of herbaceous plantings.

Some judicious seed choices might do away with the ubiquitous rows of pampas grass and New Zealand flax that adorn our urban spaces. And perhaps, Santa, with the seeds you could arrange for a dispersal of handsaws in rural areas so we can cut the ivy that is strangling so many of our trees and spoiling their sculptural winter beauty; the countryside would be transformed. The season has shown up our roads to be lined by trees weighed down with the unsightly growth.

Lastly, Santa, may I ask for some flash cards? Several of these must read ‘sorry’ and for purposes of practicality I shall keep one in the car, although at the scene of a car accident in which I was involved the use of that word once landed me in a court of law. I did explain to His Honour that ‘sorry’ had meant I was sorry the event had happened rather than accepting blame for it, and that did the job, but in the wider sphere the word could be used to avoid a lot of trouble. (A card reading Get Back would be useful too, to deter tail-gaters.)

The word sorry is a strong weapon in anyone’s armoury and indispensable in the world of hospitality where the customer, even the most mean-minded and nit-picking of individuals, is deemed to be right. (Sadly this is not the case in the medical world where practitioners avoid the word lest it will open the flood gates of litigation, when in fact so many who consider themselves wronged only want to hear that word.) And, having been peripherally involved in a law case recently and seen the hordes of bewigged show-offs – sorry, barristers - who hover expensively around litigants, I know my ‘sorry’ flash cards could be much in use.

A Croatian community group who are suing Bob Dylan for incitement to racial hatred have said they will drop the case if he apologises. It’s hard not to think that the internecine affair between the owners of Lissadell House and Sligo Co. Council may have been halted, had there been more goodwill or even the ‘sorry this is happening, can’t we fix it?’ conversation between the participants long before it reached the stage it has, with its very dire ramifications for tourism and Co. Sligo? Why does everyone have to be so litigious? So much litigation is not necessarily about justice, more about ill will. Do we want to be, as Nigella Lawson said about Charles Saatchi, people who see ‘litigation as a form of conversation’?

I’m not asking for much, Santa, but with a little tweaking at the edges I know our green and pleasant land can become a more attractive place to live and to visit. Merry Christmas to us all.

Insider View - Friendliness in Restaurants

A timely piece from Lucy Madden about the ideal level of ‘friendliness’ in restaurants - just when we are concentrating our own efforts on addressing complaints from many of our assessors about staff who fail to engage with customers. Pleasing everyone may not be an option, in Lucy’s view.

Few activities are as pleasurable as idling around the countryside in pursuit of a place to eat; time on your hands, a few euro in the pocket and a lusty appetite. This was how we found ourselves on a winter’s day when a sign drew our attention to a restaurant situated at the edge of a lake. We consulted, of course, the GC website for a recommendation and duly made our way through the door.

A cheerful person was waiting at a reception desk. “Hallo folks, how are we today?” Before we had time to answer this kind enquiry, our lady was into her next question, concerning the weather outside and from where had we come? My husband, being a more benign character than myself, found this greeting somewhat charming, I could tell, and was about to engage but a sharp poke in his ribs speeded up a request for a table.

In these days of ludicrous political correction, one is not allowed to call a female person who acts, an actress. Why then, is it permissible to call one of the female gender who waits at table, a waitress? Is it because we don’t attach the same degree of respect to those who serve us while we eat as we do to those who strut the stage? This is incidental, in a sense, but I do believe that the service of others is a noble calling, and one which demands a variety of skills.

One of these, however, is not the art of conversation. You do not visit a place of hospitality to engage in a dialogue, except of a brief and friendly nature, with those providing your food. As someone who has been both at the dispensing and receiving end of hospitality, I know that face to face interaction is a delicate line to tread, not wanting to be there when you are not needed, and to be there where you are. I know a restaurateur in London who owns four different restaurants and is known at each for his public appearances when he will arrive and cruise around the tables, interrupting conversations at will, addressing his customers by their first names and often sitting down at individual tables, alternately flattering and irritating his clients.

There is something in human nature that responds positively, even to the point of being thrilled, at being the first in a crowd to be acknowledged by a chef, or actor, or possibly by a waiter, but there can be few people who visit a restaurant to chat to the owner. These sad souls are most likely to hover and lurk around pubs where they can be greeted by ‘Your usual, Frank?’ Of course, one is pleased to be remembered from a previous visit and indeed to have one’s preferences recorded. The only place, incidentally, where one might prefer not to be remembered, as I have discovered, is the local A and E department which I have visited on occasions with a very accident prone grandson. But that is another story.

The waitresses at the aforementioned lakeside restaurant had clearly been instructed to present a friendly and welcoming appearance to the clientele, much in the way that Tesco and Ryanair have recently learned the lessons of not doing so. But during the course of our dinner (and we counted) we were interrupted no less than 12 times by different people to be asked if ‘everything is all right?’ and twice we were asked where we came from, and had we seen the view from the windows? Grumpy and isolationist I may be, but this incessant chatter only served to irritate, and not to serve.

You might argue that this is preferable to the haughty indifference of waiters in more sophisticated restaurants or to places where waiting staff are more interested in talking to each other than attending to customers, but, as in everything, there is a happy medium.

The art of good service is a subtle and necessary part of the dining experience to which, incidentally, nothing is added by teaching staff parroted phrases such as ‘You’re welcome’ every time they are thanked. And thanking staff is very, very important (a friend says her waitressing experiences of customers’ indifference made her a communist). Another friend currently working at Claridges in London says she is appalled by the rudeness of certain groups of people but puts it down to cultural differences. That, again, is another story.

But pity the poor host, it’s so hard to get it right. A relative whose children run a very successful catering company in London booked in to the Gavroche restaurant using their company name (a process that was far from straightforward} and having dined at this famous Michelin starred restaurant remembered it for one reason only; obsessing that the host Michel Roux who had been in the restaurant had not come over to their table to greet them.

There is just no pleasing some people.

Insider View - Diets

This month Lucy Madden’s ever-questioning eye lands on the thorny subject of Diets…some timely observations, just as we’re all trying to address the perennial problem of the tightening winter waistband...

A guest, of the non-paying variety, arrived here recently with her own lunch. This was not because we did not have an ample spread ready for her on the table, but because, as she announced, she couldn’t eat any of it since she was a ‘raw vegan’ and proceeded to spread out her wares onto an empty plate.

It all looked a bit dismal to me; limp lettuce, some sliced cucumber, a tomato or two with a sprinkling of something that resembled sawdust.

Had she not then told us that on this diet she was able to run 6 miles every day, I would have worried for her health, mentally and physically, but admittedly, she looked bright-eyed and frisky.

As one who, over the years, has encountered an unknown number of these ‘diets’, I have come to think of them as rather self-regarding and tedious.

It’s fine if you want to live off beetroot juice and green tea in the isolation of your own kitchen, but to foist them onto the rest of us and insist on sticking rigidly to your diet in all circumstances, is taking things too far. It’s against all the principles of hospitality, communality, sociability and common sense.

We have been asked to collaborate in various different food fads for guests, even with a family who requested that their food be cooked in saucepans solely for their own group.

It’s reasonable to ask for something that you are prepared to pay for and this was fine because the request was made in advance, enabling us to refuse the party in question, but is it reasonable to demand a diet of some complexity that is not on offer in the first place?

The Atkins, the Dukan, the Cabbage soup, the Every-other-day, the Maple syrup, last year’s Fast diet, and now the latest diet the Paleo are all bewilderingly contradictory and frankly mind-numbing. Their exponents, unless of the rich and polished variety who are going to look marvellous in any case, often do little to advertise the benefits of their food regimes.

Take, for example, the wizened looking couple in their early sixties who ran round Australia fuelled only by a handful of bananas. They look years older than their real ages.

I am surprising myself by this catalogue of spite because I believe passionately in the importance of diet. In our crazy society where half the population is obese and fat children have become the norm, why are our supermarkets three-quarters filled with the foods that make us so?

We are in danger of turning into a society that exists in Los Angeles, where body shapes are either whale-like or skeletal. The only anomaly I have found in having cancer treatment is that nobody involved in the care ever asked me what I eat and when questioned about this, the response was always that there was no hard evidence that diet had an influence. No hard evidence, perhaps, but the empirical evidence is surely overwhelming?

But there is healthy eating (although not everyone agrees about what this is) and there are diets that are at the extreme end of fanciful. Perhaps the daftest diet I have encountered is the ‘mindful’ Eat- what-you-like-but-only-when-you-really-feel-like-it, which I would have thought was more damaging to family life than one might care to contemplate.

However, with these contemporary fads come business opportunities. Where vegetarian and even vegan restaurants are now considered normal, might there not be a market for more evangelical eating? One could advertise, say, that one specialises in Dukan and South Beach, or that followers of raw food eating are especially welcome.

These places may already exist. I did stay at a hotel in Norfolk last summer where there was no breakfast menu but we were told we could have ‘whatever we liked’. This was a little curious and an invitation for some fun, but it was no surprise when a request for a kipper was turned down with a hopeful ‘you could have salmon instead.’

Anyone interested in nutrition cannot have failed to notice that there is one food group that is rarely excluded from any diet and this is vegetables.

Fruit may be suspect because of its fructose content and even wholewheat bread is viewed with suspicion because of its sugar content. Followers of the Paleo diet must beat themselves up if they eat a lentil curry, but something green and growing is recognised everywhere as being a jolly good thing.

This is why we as a country have such an advantage when it comes to food production and why this very green and pleasant land could be a haven for almost any extreme eater.

Insider View - Is Irish Food Really Getting Better?

This month Lucy Madden questions whether Irish food is really getting better - saying that, in rural Ireland, a good meal at a reasonable price is hard to find

It was a recycled wine bottle filled with a brownish liquid lurking on the table that alerted us to the fact that all was not well. We were a party of 8, meeting for lunch in a restaurant in the Midlands and, having pre-booked, arrived at the venue to see that we were the only customers there.

We were led through an empty room to a narrow nook at the back where our table awaited. Above us, the wall was decorated with a sign reading Toilets and as we ate those visiting this destination and thus opening the door sent a breeze of bleach across our bows.

The food was vaguely reminiscent of the early 1970s. My salad was decorated with a flotilla of fruits – orange and kiwi, a slice or two of apple and of course vol-au-vents featured largely on the menu. Baked goods had clearly had an existence over a long weekend. There may well be a market for this kind of fare but it was not in evidence that day.

If our host, a kindly woman in her sixties, had not looked so harassed and disappointed with life and had she not informed us that business was very slow, we would have expressed some measure of discontent. As it was, we paid up and left, but how is it that some businesses can get it so radically wrong? What would a tourist think arriving to eat here? This is at a time when we are overwhelmed with advice about producing good food and yet, as we know, food has scored very low in some recent visitor appreciation surveys.

As Fran Lebovitz said about her native country “If you are visiting America, bring your own food”. One of the most distressing things about living in these islands off the coast of Europe is our food culture. The rows, and rows, of confectionery and sugary drinks on sale in our shops, the ubiquity of the over-weight and the seeming determination of a vast majority of the population to resist any change in their diet bewilders and appals, in equal measures.

This was demonstrated locally in my grandson’s primary school where a recent campaign to improve the diets of the wee ones was met with a forceful and indignant Facebook campaign by parents who were ‘not going to be told what to do’ and so the children continue to go to school with lunch boxes packed with crisps, sweets and minerals (not of the nutritious kind). Are these the restaurateurs of the future? Nobody likes to sink her teeth into a carvery lunch more than I, in the occasional burst of nostalgia for the food of my childhood, but this is not the kind of fare that is going to bring in the tourists.

Last year in a mood of despair I told a huge woman in a supermarket in Enniskillen that she was poisoning her children with her trolley load of fats and sugar. After the inevitable altercation with her and her (huge) teenage children I later found her loading fruits and vegetables into the trolley, now emptied of its previous contents, and, to my surprise, she hugged me and said how grateful she was because her children bullied her to buy ‘rubbish’. This encounter proves little except that we are caught up in a cycle of poor nutrition that has been foisted on us by uncaring and greedy food processors.

The chef Dylan McGrath, speaking recently on radio, told his audience that, in the last couple of years, food was improving on our island and that chefs were ‘updating’ traditional foods. As a person of a certain age I felt a strange affront at his arrogant words because it seemed he had forgotten a whole raft of wonderful cooks who have revolutionised food in this country since the 1970s.

The Allen family, for a start; the influence of Ballymaloe cannot be challenged. It is very easy, and very misguided, for new generations to dismiss what has gone before and imagine that they and they alone have an understanding of the zeitgeist. I say there is too much faux foreign food around, too much sweet chilli sauce, panini, burritos et al.

You only have to look at the cookery books that were written centuries ago, to realise that food goes through many incarnations and that menu planning in past times was far more sophisticated than it is today. You can indeed eat very well in this country, but in rural Ireland a good meal at a reasonable price is hard to find and is this so surprising when our future food providers are being raised as fatties?

There seems to be a disconnect between our genuinely great food producers and the public at large. I read of a successful restaurateur in Boston who brings a busload of under-privileged children every week to his premises, gives them lunch off his menu and then a tour of his kitchens and wine-cellars. What better way could there be to introduce the next generation to good food? Step this way, children.

Insider View on Northern Ireland

This month Lucy Madden says it will be a sad day when Mother Nature is not enough, and a place must be theme-parked to attract visitors

A perfect day. They so rarely occur, but imagine sitting under a cloudless sky, sharing a picnic with loved ones, perched on a hillside and watching the little fishing boats as they chug around Strangford Lough and the lazy trawl of the ferry as it makes its way, to and fro.

Behind us is a castle and the view takes in woods and fields and distant hills. Suddenly the quiet is broken by a group of young people who have come across the field and are approaching the castle. Nothing wrong with that but one of them is curiously clothed in a cloak that swirls and from beneath the folds a sword gleams in the sunshine.

What, we enquire, is going on? The cloaked one explains that they are plotting out a route that will be marketed as ‘The Game of Thrones’ Way, or some such and the young ones in our party gurgle with joy, all interest in the natural world abandoned.

As we are all expected to know, ‘The Game of Thrones’ is a very popular television series that is filmed in the north of Ireland, so it seems obvious that ‘the brand’ should be used to attract visitors? But will it?

The north of Ireland is without doubt a beautiful and relatively unspoiled area, underappreciated and well worth visiting, but do we want our countryside to be re-branded as some sort of medieval fantasy? Admittedly, it ill behoves one who is addicted to Coronation Street and who would like nothing more than to visit Manchester to dilly dally in the Rovers Return, to criticise attempts to capitalise on successful television programmes, but sometimes pastoral serenity is all that is required on a holiday. Sword-wielding Goths are not going to improve the scenery.

Earlier this year we visited Derry/Londonderry (the nomenclature is enough to put one off) to see the short-listed Turner prize entries displayed in the city. On leaving the gallery we were asked to fill in a questionnaire with our impressions of the visit. All of these were most positive but I couldn’t get out of my mind remarks made by a friend from the south which I know are felt by many outside the north and which the politicians would do well to take on board.

“I just don’t want to go there,” she said of Northern Ireland. “Not until they stop squabbling.” This view is often echoed and no amount of slick marketing is going to overcome the exasperation and alienation felt by people outside about the obsession with flag-waving and marching and general nose-rubbing that we see regularly on the news.

Living as we do in Borderlands we are in and out of the north all the time, and have come to appreciate its diverse scenery and beautiful coastline; Michael Palin identified the train journey between Coleraine and Derry as one of the most breath-taking in the world.

Belfast is a great city to visit with a vibrant cultural life and excellent restaurants but during a recent visit to one of the best, Ox, we were surprised to see a man walk along the pavement outside waving a large Union Jack.

His aggressive body language seemed so incongruous and jarred with the otherwise sophisticated surroundings. I’m afraid it is going to take a lot more than the identification of a place with a television programme to convince many people to visit the north of our island.

Recent statistics have shown that more of us are holidaying at home, and I clearly underestimate the lure of fantasy; the popularity of the Disneyworlds have already shown that. But it will be a sad day when Mother Nature is not enough, when a place must be theme-parked to attract visitors.

We can leave the idylls as they are, allow the truly wild to flourish while concocting different experiences for those who want them. Some people’s appetite, however, for the bizarre and the lurid has not changed that much. It is worth remembering that Bedlam was once London’s main tourist attraction.

Insider View on Calorie Counted Menus

Chef Special in Bed by Ken Buggy This month, Lucy Madden speaks for us all - on the dread topic of calorie-counted menus - and has some sensible tips on meaningful menus too. (Ken Buggy’s quirky drawing shown here, has been pinned up in the Guide’s office for many years by the way…)

Picture the scene. A couple in a restaurant are perusing the menu. After prolonged head-scratching, one says “I think I’ll have the pork, but I can do that only if I have a half-portion of mussels.” His companion, after some maths, replies: “Honey that leaves you way over the limit. That’s only possible if you don’t have the potato. And put that piece of bread back in the basket.”

A public consultation held by the Food Safety Authority reveals that 96 per cent of us consumers are in favour of displaying on menus the calorific nature of the food on offer. How can this be so? I know it is popular in America, but then so much of American life, like child beauty pageants and gun laws, are not to our liking.

Dining out is meant to be fun, not a guilt-inducing, number-crunching experience. I can see that there is an argument for large restaurant chains whose offerings change little, and whose products are generally accepted to be waist-line unfriendly, to have to display the calorific value of each plateful, or boxful.

The makers of the Happy Meal could lead the way perhaps? But the idea that businesses who change their menus on a daily or weekly basis, should have to start counting calories, even with the aid of MenuCal, an online tool for food businesses, is likely to tip some providers over into insanity. How, for instance, do you assess the calories of a plate of homemade scones which are inevitably of different sizes and the lottery of how much cream constitutes a spoonful?

In our own small premises, food is chosen on a daily basis and according to what is fresh and available. To run a small food business is, as I know well, to flirt with disaster. So much can go so wrong, as even Heston Blumenthal found out, and it is no wonder that so many of the world’s great chefs can’t stand the heat.

Even when you do it well, as happened in a neighbouring town, where an enterprising Portuguese opened a café serving a small choice of freshly cooked food with lots of salads and at a reasonable price, success is far from guaranteed. Within weeks a copycat version had opened across the street and his clientele was halved. He closed, of course, but his rival has reverted to micro-waved fare of an indigestible nature, and the loss is everyone’s.

The idea that hard-pressed kitchens should have to evaluate calories is just not on. I would argue, too, that the message is being delivered to the wrong people, and that those in need of drastic weight reduction are not the ones who frequent the places where good food is served. I just don’t believe that the obese study the nutrition labels on food packages. It is the already stick thin who scrutinise the small print, call for egg white omelettes and declare themselves lactose intolerant.

On the subject of menus, too, I read that the use of French is falling out of fashion and a good thing too since so often it is (hilariously) inaccurate in translation. The decline in the popularity of so-called fine dining may have something to do with this, as there is a growing realisation that diners are fed up with being intimidated by starchy interiors or uppity waiters or bewilderment at the choices before them.

While we are at it, recreating our menus, I would suggest that two of my own pet hates are knocked on the head, once and for all. The term ‘pan-fried’ should be first to go since what other vessel can be used for the purposes of frying? Secondly, is the expression ‘on a bed of…’, a crudely clichéd term for the dreadful practise of presenting food as a pyramid. Nor would we miss meaningless generic terms like ‘farm eggs’ or ‘homemade jam’.

Lengthy menus should be avoided too, since clearly it is not possible to produce scores of dishes in the average restaurant kitchen and the food is more likely to have put together in a factory in a faraway land.

As food writer Michael Pollan suggests, choose a restaurant where the delivery vans out the back are small, because if a restaurant is getting its supplies delivered by articulated lorry, the food is likely to be undistinguished.

Here a personal anecdote: on this day of writing after a walk in the fantastic Cavan Burren we went to eat at a nearby caff. My daughter, granddaughter and I ordered delicate helpings of carrot soup and a roll, then sat down.

At the next table a couple were attacking platefuls of an Ulster Fry, the All Day breakfast. Our eyes met. Go and change the order, I whispered to the granddaughter. Some moments later we were all tucking into fried bread, sausages, mushrooms, bacon and eggs.

Thank goodness there were no reminders of the calories we were consuming. If we want to pay for the occasional pig-out, leave us alone. Let’s keep our restaurants free from the worthiness police.

Insider View on Demanding Guests

This month, Lucy Madden describes some of the increasingly unreasonable behaviour of demanding guests - observing that ‘the accumulation of wealth and power seems to go hand in hand with rudeness and often, inexplicably, meanness’.

Can you imagine being described as ‘a nightmare’? Even this keyhole Katie has not heard herself thus described - yet - but this is a word increasingly bandied about to describe guests among those whose life work is providing hospitality. As travel opportunities broaden, so too does the public’s appetite to be pleasured.

My childhood holidays spent in seaside boarding houses where it was necessary to be out of the premises all day and where alcohol was forbidden although ironically the ‘lounge’ was thick with stale pipe smoke, are a long way from the Valhalla in which many of today’s holiday makers expect to find themselves.

At a small Welsh hotel in the 1950s the highlight of the evening was a rallying call from the landlady announcing the distribution of plates of junket. We looked forward to it all day. Imagine the ribaldry that would accompany such an announcement today. And what is junket, I hear you ask?

Over time, our dizzying expectations of holidays, bolstered by social media and the increasing opportunities afforded to us demand more and more of the hospitality provider. Does anyone these days spare a thought for these poor souls? Perhaps the worst offender is ‘the bride’s mother’ but more of this later.

My own observation of the world’s travellers is that the richer they come, the worse they behave. Scott Fitzgerald never wrote a wiser sentence than ‘the rich are different’. Sadly, the accumulation of wealth and power seems to go hand in hand with rudeness and often, inexplicably, meanness. Lavish tips are more likely to come from the hands of the less well off.

Our own island is unlikely to become a playground for the very rich, except in racing circles, and for this we should be glad. Our daughter once worked for a rich and powerful man and was horrified by the enormity of his ego even when his demands put the lives of those around him in danger.

She was, however, part of his retinue when he was told – not ‘asked’ – to leave a hotel in France after a particular incident of bad behaviour. It takes some courage and not a little foolhardiness to tell a guest to leave, but there are occasions when one is sorely tempted.

Recently a party from a distant shore arrived here and demanded that we make up bedrooms on our ground floor for them as they did not wish to climb two flights of stairs to the existing rooms.

This might have been possible in their native country where labour is cheap and available on tap, but in this 350 year old house, such removals are not on. Many travellers seem to expect complete standardisation of services and establishment with no regard for the experience that the providers set out to offer, or as in this case any comprehension of the limitations imposed by the character of the building they have chosen. This type of encounter is something new; the spoilt of the world are on the move. A plateful of junket will no longer cut the mustard.

The relationship between hosts and guests is a delicate one with tact necessary from both parties. It behoves the host to give as good a service as is possible and permissible, but the visitor must not demand more than can reasonably be given although increasingly this is happening.

Here I think of that species ‘the bride’s mother’ and it has not escaped attention that many wedding venues now limit the amount of telephone calls and emails that are permitted in the contract in the run-up to the wedding.

In the way that film makers will take over public places with their paraphernalia and demand immediate obedience from bystanders, even reluctant ones, so the bridal event becomes a force that brooks no obstacles and takes no prisoners. (Here, however, I must admit that my own dislike of attending weddings, the ultimate in social torment especially for the over 50s, may be influencing my judgement).

The type of guest that this family has encountered over the years has been an endorsement of the qualities of human nature. Whether this is something to do with the fact that the type of person who is attracted to a heritage property in rural Ireland is more likely to be a curious, courteous and appreciative human being than one who prefers the world’s fleshpots, is just my observation. That my family do not run a complex in a beachside resort in a hot country, I shall be forever grateful.

I recently spent some hours in the departure lounge at Bristol airport and saw the bulbous, flesh-baring fatties gathered for take-off to sunny climes attired in outfits that will do little to enhance the reputation of British designers, and I feared for the world.

That societies where modesty and reticence is revered should have to play host to people so disrespectful of their cultures must have unforeseen consequences. Just as we don’t want visitors who we will describe as ‘nightmares’, so too might Black Sea beaches strewn with the marauding and near naked obese have its own consequences.
Travellers are ambassadors, after all.

Insider View on the Trials & Tribulations of Travel

This month, Lucy Madden wonders why does the airport experience have to be so unpleasant ? But the trains are no better - and as for the experiences of overseas visitors over-70s wishing to hire a car…

Sometimes I wish we did not live on an island, because this necessitates negotiating airports or ferry ports in order to leave it. Two friends and I met by chance the other day at Dublin Airport. We were all taking different flights but, as two of us have arrived at a time in life when we are referred to as ‘the elderly’, we were both in states of extreme anxiety about negotiating the obstacle course to the departure gates. Had we left enough time (two hours?) Our younger friend, a more seasoned traveller calmed us down and suggested we go for a cup of coffee. My older friend and I exchanged panic-struck glances. Surely there was no time for this?

However, five minutes later I was ordering three Americanos when a voice from behind the counter shouted Name? Was she talking to me? I looked at the queue behind but clearly she was directing her question at me. Had I committed some airport misdemeanour (an undisclosed sachet of conditioner, my bus ticket in the wrong recycling container, complaining too loudly about delayed flights?). “Madden” I shouted back. “Margot?” she replied interrogatively. I let it go, better to be arrested under a pseudonym. Returning to my friends, I waited for the heavy hand of the law to arrive on my shoulder; this has happened to a friend of mine. Instead, the girl from the coffee counter arrived with a tray and placed in front of us three polystyrene cups. On each, in swirly writing could just be deciphered the word ‘Margot’.

Is anyone over the age of 13 impressed by such nonsense? Like so many bad ideas, it probably comes from across the pond and is most out of place at an airport where haste is paramount. Why does the airport experience have to be so unpleasant and your name on your disposable coffee cup does nothing to lessen that.

The security check is an ordeal and so erratic. The other day I was emptying out a suitcase that has been ferried for years through several different airports and found stuck into the lining a pair of scissors that had not been spotted when toothpaste tubes and innocent little jars from within have been confiscated.

Having one’s suitcase emptied in public is a humiliating experience at the best of times. The holiday returnee is likely to have bundles of unwashed garments that their owner is reluctant to see spilled out on an airport counter. I know, I know, it’s got to be done, but if there were international rules that could apply to all airports, it would make travelling less disturbing. The unwary traveller does not know what to expect.

There is another problem that is likely to arise these days in many situations but is more stressful when travelling. Having reached an age where watching television dramas involves asking younger people in the room “What are they saying? What’s happening?” every few minutes until a flying object puts a stop to it, understanding heavily accented speech is increasingly difficult.

At Hong Kong airport my sister found impenetrable some instructions given to her by the Chinese security officer until her increasing embarrassment was ended when a young woman explained that he was saying if she wanted to keep her nail file, she could go back and check it in. It was not without irony that she observed sitting next to her on the plane home was a woman wielding a crochet hook as she pulled wool back and forth.

The trains are no better. In our part of the country there are none, but travelling recently from London to Swansea with my short legs necessarily angled to fit in to the allotted space of my seat, I could see little but the back of the seat in front.

My neighbour, who had bagged the window seat ,at frequent intervals requested I stand to allow him to leave. This became mildly irritating until this Miss Marple noticed that each time he returned to his seat he was wearing a different item of clothing and by the end of our journey he had entirely swapped the garish sportswear with which he had boarded the train at Paddington for a dark suit and tie.

The days of brief encounters in the more glamorous setting of the traditional railway carriage may be gone, but even the more uncomfortable strictures of modern train travel are not without interest, even if you don’t have the panorama of the landscape.

Overseas visitors arriving here often moan loudly about their travel experiences. The most usual and upsetting complaint seems to be the shock for the over-70s of the inability on arrival to hire a car.

A person who holds a driving licence in their home country should surely be deemed fit to drive around our own. The spending power of the ‘elderly’ is something to be encouraged, particularly when the airport experience is likely to deter. Once here, this is one small way to get visitors to enjoy their stay and that’s what we all want, isn’t it?

Insider View

Ending the year on an optimistic note, Lucy Madden finds encouragement in the observation that a more relaxed approach in restaurants and hotels does not have to mean a lessening of standards, more a shift in emphasis

A local shopkeeper told me that she had overheard two of her customers who were availing of a midweek break in a hotel in town complaining that, unlike on a previous visit, they had not found a bowl of fruit and a vase of fresh flowers awaiting them in the bedroom. Diddums!

She and I both know that the hotel in question has struggled, as have so many, over the last few years just to keep in business and that they have drastically had to cut their prices to stay open, keep their staff and maintain a level of occupancy to keep afloat.

Hence the ridiculously small amount the couple were paying for their three nights and one dinner. That these guests should be indifferent to the difficulties facing the hotel and expect a level of service for which they were not paying, is a measure of the problems facing the business. Trying to compete with Nama hotels and at the same time deliver the little extras is not always possible. And yet.

In his recently published book ‘Grow’ JIM Stengel, an ex Proctor and Gamble CMO, states that research shows that the best performing companies are those who are driven by a clear purpose to make customers’ lives better. An observation, you might think, for the book of the blindingly obvious, and one especially relevant to the hospitality sector.

The recession necessarily hit especially hard in areas of discretionary spending. With corporate business gone, weekends away becoming ‘one night’ and the expectations of the public driving prices ever lower, survival has been at the cost of trimming unnecessary expense; but do we think like this at our peril? Not, I suggest, if we major on the one thing that costs us nothing – our smile, our welcome and our willingness to help.

The supermarket wars currently being waged between the German discounters Aldi/Lidl and the older stores are an example of what happens when Steigel’s theories of customer pleasing are ignored. A couple of decades ago our aforementioned local town had a thriving and permanent fish shop. Tesco opened a superstore and within it a fish counter selling similar produce. Our little fish shop could not survive the competition and within weeks it closed.

It was not long before Tesco had closed down its abundant fish counter and took to offering a narrow range of pre-packed fish in its chill cabinet. Was this an example of giving customers what we wanted or was it a cynical exercise in dominating the market?

We have seen countless similar practices down the years that no little tricks like branding the shopping aisles with Irish street names are going to disguise. ‘Every little helps’ indeed, but helps Tesco first.

Then along came retailers who have discovered what it is we really, really want, which is a limited range of high quality goods at low prices, where the shopping experience is designed to please rather than confuse with silly offers and is it any wonder that there must be a lot of worried people running the more established supermarkets? And as for loyalty cards, don’t get me started.

People should take heart from this shift in the market place because it demonstrates that less can be more, even in the world of hospitality. Masterchef judge and chef Marcus Wareing has relaunched his 2 star restaurants, recognising that people are bored with listening to waiters describing 10 ingredients and has said that chefs are relieved to shed the fine dining style; they don’t feel comfortable looking down on their customers. If we are seeing a more relaxed approach in restaurants and hotels it does not have to mean a lessening of standards, more a shift in emphasis.

Do we really need chocolates on the pillow and fruit bowls on the dressing table when we can get a nice smile instead.

Insider View - on Parties

Lucy Madden begins the new year by sharing a guilty secret - and it is one that will be familiar to many...

My sister and I for years have shared a guilty secret; it may be hard to believe but we hate (and I choose the word carefully) going to parties. Unfortunately friends refuse to believe this strange quirk, (“You’ll love it when you get there/here”) so the occasional invitation still arrives to be greeted by cries of ‘Oh no.’

Since my sibling and I live in different countries, the details of the most recent event is usually conveyed amid wafts of laughter and expressions of sympathy over the telephone and, as she and her elderly man-friend move in more elevated circles, by dint of their work in the entertainment world, than do I, our social experiences are rather different.

Yet the core issues remain the same; neither she nor I can circulate a room issuing witty bon mots, we remain peripherally frozen and usually locked in mutual boredom with others like us. To stand amid a braying crowd and clutching an empty glass, assaulted by noise and space invaders and being asked over and over ‘Have we come far?’, what is there to like about that?

Now that the party season has, thankfully, receded into memory, we have been reflecting on the whole question of party giving and come up with the conclusion that for her, at any rate, the level of hospitality is in inverse proportion to the wealth of the host. She tells me of gatherings that are contained in the narrowest of time strictures, where ‘nibbles’ are the only food on offer, drink appears to be rationed and there is nowhere to sit down.

At New Year’s Eve she is a masochist and goes to an annual event hosted by a well-known director that starts at 10pm, offers crisps for sustenance, gels around the television at midnight and is followed by entertainment that consists of the director’s daughter trilling in the conservatory. This is England, after all.

We have come to the conclusion that partying is for the young and those looking for sexual partners or, if it is going to be any fun at all, must involve large amounts of drink and a complete abandonment of self. Groups of the elderly sipping sherry and exchanging medical symptoms or, as over Christmas, our experiences with the turkey, are not for these grumpy old girls. Give us a radio drama and a pile of ironing and we are far happier.

Old acquaintance nonetheless demands the party season and a grateful hospitality industry rejoices that it does. Our own establishment has relished the get-togethers of others that have gathered under our roof. But this is Ireland and the Irish know how to party.

There is a seam of generosity that exists in Ireland when it comes to having a good time that is generally absent in the land of my birth. Growing up in London my father’s concern about hosting an event concentrated on schemes for terminating it as early as possible. At what time could he reasonably start emptying the ash-trays? Could he switch the lights off? Parties, those rare events, were referred to as ‘kill-offs’; in other words to repay the hospitality of others with as little effort and money as possible.

The preparations were minimal and involved putting tinned pineapple, squares of cheese and glacé cherries onto cocktail sticks. The piáce de résistance was scrambled egg pasted onto circles of fried bread. There might have been a bowl of cheese footballs. We filled up the cigarette boxes. This was the 1960s after all. The most asked question whispered between my parents during the event was ‘When are they going?’. This early indoctrination about social life is hard to shake off.

The irony of this is that to remain in some way in control of a historic house, as for others in similar predicaments, has meant for us to be permanently at the centre of some sort of jamboree. This New Year’s Eve found my son-in-law, he who in a previous incarnation had been the life and soul of many a party, soberly brushing out the grate in the dining room.

When I pointed out the change in his circumstances, how he was now the staff at another’s party, he replied with great conviction that his new role was much the most satisfying and how he preferred not to be part of the pressures of being a guest. And this is the nub of it, the burden of being fun when you are not psychologically so is a tough call and preferably better left to those who are. There are enough of you around.

To be below stairs, polishing glasses or adding the last minute touches to the plates of others, while above the merry roar of a crowd at play expands with the night; to be part of it and yet not part of it, this is happiness

Insider View

This month Lucy Madden considers with a mixture of sadness and wry amusement some of the consequences that follow high jinks and disrespect for historic properties and antiques - and urges culrpits to ‘Fess up’ or be remembered with contempt.

A friend who is attempting to keep the roof on his historic home and its antique contents intact by taking in paying guests, has told me of a recent weekend he hosted that is causing him some perplexity.

Usually, when taking bookings over the telephone, he is able to ‘get a sense’ of the person at the other end and what is expected. In this case, a group of 25 people, having negotiated a rock-bottom rate, were booked in for what they described as ‘a significant birthday’ which normally implies a sedate gathering of the elderly.

Double rooms were booked and nothing seemed amiss until the day of arrival dawned and a bus drew up to disgorge a collection of clearly testosterone fuelled young men, some of whom were ferrying carrier bags from the local off licence. An alarm bell began to sound.

The promised birthday party had suddenly revealed itself in its true colours, a stag party. When my friend pointed out to the most boisterous of the pack that this was not what he was expecting, the answer came “You wouldn’t have taken us if I’d told you the truth”. Too right.

By the end of the weekend the poor old house bore the evidence of this. The most permanent damage was to the drawing room floor where the carpet had been rolled back for a night of wild partying and red wine spillage on antique parquet.

A much-loved artefact sculpted by a friend had been taken from its stand and snapped in half. Most of the traces of this exuberant party of ‘posh boys’ were not discovered until after their departure and while none of it could be construed as criminal damage, it was damage to the heart.

Before they left, the best man to be had apologised so profusely and with such charm that the bewildered host decided to put the matter down to experience. This was until the following week when he saw by chance on the BBC news this same man revealed as an estate agent who had overseen one of the most expensive house sales ever recorded. That this young man who had clearly made so much money from property should have shown such disrespect to my friend’s own much-loved house, left a bitter taste.

Owners renting out holiday cottages habitually take refundable damage deposits of modest proportions, but hosts in historic houses can only hope that the trust they repose in their clients will be reciprocated.

You might say that the host in this case should have called a halt to the over-exuberance of his visitors, but the disinclination to spoil the fun is a characteristic of a good host. Try, too, calling ‘cool it, lads’ to a roomful of the inebriated and see where it gets you.

This tale reminded me of a Nile cruise some years ago where we found ourselves on a boat with a group of dedicated revellers from the north of England which was determined at every stage to outwit the attempts of our guide to keep us in check. He was a surly individual who answered any question with complete disdain and to him women were invisible.

Cold war had broken out between this kill-joy and a certain feisty individual called Stanley. At some point we were gathered under a very hot sun at the temple of Luxor whilst our guide explained the various deities that we were observing. I forget the details, but one of the statues, he told us, was missing ‘the thirteenth part’ and for about the only time on the trip, he smiled lasciviously.

We had, of course, been warned not to attempt to remove anything from this historic site, so it was a shock when Stanley, on the bus home, said ‘See what I’ve got’ and from the recesses of his coat pulled out a stone object resembling a phallus. Round the bus, in awed whispers passed the words, ‘the thirteenth part!’. With a deep chuckle, our resident thief, put the stone into his backpack and secured the strap.

That night, at dinner and in the presence of the guide, our friend from the north brought the conversation round to his acquisition and pressed for details of its value. “Of course” said our wily guide, “whoever finds and takes away this missing part is cursed and will suffer an agonising death.” There was a silence punctuated by a dismayed “Oh Stan” from his wife, she who had laughed long and loud on the bus.

Next morning at breakfast there was no sign of Stan but he reappeared, red and breathless, just as our boat was due to leave. ‘I had to put it back,’ he gasped, ‘I can’t risk the consequences.’

Risking the consequences may not be something that is high on the agenda on an alcohol fuelled group outing, but as one who has occasionally, over the years, and after guests have left, discovered breakages hidden away in drawers, and cigarette burns disguised by the judicious replacing of cushions, my advice is ‘’Fess up’ to any damage you may cause. The gratitude felt by the host for your honesty is unlikely to result in a request for damages, and if you don’t, you will be found out and remembered with contempt.

Insider View - Airbnb

This month Lucy Madden considers the rampant rise of Airbnb - and the merits of spending precious time and money with people who know what they are doing, i.e. the hospitality professionals

Once a week in our local town a van selling fish sets up stall a sardine’s toss from the supermarket where each day is offered a good display of seafood. The supermarket pays rates and rents and employs a number of people to offer goods and services on a daily basis.

I can see the point of bringing fish to fishless towns and villages, but to undercut a going and committed concern that contributes much to the local community is a little cheeky. Nose in air, this goody-two shoes makes a point of ignoring the fish van as she passes with a conspicuous shop-bought fish head poking out of her shopping basket.

To me, the fish van has some parallels with Airbnb. This internet phenomenon started small in 2008 in an attic in San Francisco, where two young men rented out mattresses to people attending a conference, and has burgeoned into the World of Trips presiding over a global ‘community’ (endorsed by Hollywood celebrities, always a bad sign), who open their homes in order to lure tourists away from bona fide hotels, guest houses and bed and breakfast establishments. These latter businesses, as anyone who has ever run one knows, before opening must endure an inquisition with form-filling and inspections and the hovering presence of Health and Safety.

Meanwhile Jo and Josephine Soap are at liberty to open the doors of their private houses and apartments offering accommodation at lesser prices than open-all-year establishments with trained staff: in other words, the professionals. But there are signs that this global monolith may be a victim of its own success.

The observation that good ideas are taken over by the wrong people could apply here. Disquiet is being voiced about the online rental company being shown to have a possible deleterious effect on local housing rental markets. Stricter controls are being called for.

This is for others to determine. And admittedly, I know of many people, including members of my own family, who have had good experiences staying in rooms through Airbnb, I know of others who have been confronted with rude hosts, shared bathrooms, long flights of stairs up to poky and dirty accommodation. And the truth is that many guests are reluctant to complain and on the website will accord the host a better rating than is deserved.

The pitfalls are of a hospitality platform where the premises are not vetted, allowing utterly misleading information to proliferate, where upfront payment, often not refundable, is demanded, and where the lack of checks and boundaries can lead to disappointment and resentment. For both parties, hosts and guests, this may be so.

Who would willingly open their home to strangers or, for that matter, spend the night in an unknown and alien household? It’s clear that the promoters of this platform are internet whizzes, but from feedback from their hosts it would appear they know little about the practicalities of running a hospitality business. In particular they seem like innocents abroad where gougers, review blackmailers and other undesirables are concerned.

All this aside, when, a few months ago, my husband who had recently become an Airbnb host (yes we were at it too) started muttering about ‘cultish behaviour’, I scoffed loudly. We had had our experience of cults.

We had brushed with Scientology. I remembered too in the 1960s when my sister became involved with pyramid selling and how she had returned from a ‘Mind Dynamics’ weekend such a changed person with a glazed expression and irrational views. This surely is a million miles from organisations like Airbnb that just offer travellers the experience of staying, cheaply, in private accommodation. And yet. There are elements in their language which strike me as being increasingly creepy.

In a short space Airbnb has transmogrified into becoming the ‘Travel Agent of the 21st Century’. Its Masterplan is to Own Every Part of your Trip. Do we really want this? But the most worrying part of the whole enterprise to me is the new command that hosts and guests sign up to the Community Commitment; refusal to do so resulting in banishment. This edict promises the usual non-discrimination in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation etc. and strikes me as controlling, patronising and way outside their remit.

We have for decades had the great good fortune to be included in a number of prestigious guides, none of which have ever made us sign up to a code of conduct. They do not invite members unless they are happy they know how to behave.

The language of Airbnb, which is essentially a profit-making organisation, and clearly a very successful one, is increasingly disturbing, seeking to create a world of ‘a Community of us’ and ‘them, who don’t conform’.The irony of this is that the ‘non-discriminatory’ inner circle becomes more and more exclusive.

Maybe I am missing something here, but why on earth when you decide to spend precious time and money away from your own home, would you not prefer to do it with people who know what they are doing – in other words, the professionals?

Together with her husband Johnny & family, Lucy Madden owns the magnificent 18th century mansion, Hilton Park, Clones, Co Monaghan which is run by their son and daughter-in-law, Fred and Joanna, as an Ireland’s Blue Book country house, and open to private guests, groups, small weddings and conferences. The restored formal gardens are also open by arrangement. Lucy is a keen organic gardener and also a member of the Irish Food Writers’ Guild.

Insider View

In sparkling form this month, Lucy Madden asserts that “for anyone young, and naturally sociable, there can be few more promising career paths to take than in hospitality”.

An ebullient man with a broad smile is bearing down on us, hand extended in welcome. In his greeting it is hard to establish whether we have met before, and I don’t think he knows either, so obfuscating and all-encompassing is his conviviality.

This is Richard Corrigan, whose latest enterprise in Virginia, Co Cavan includes pop-up lunches hosted in the glasshouse in his extensive gardens. I watch him work the room, bestowing the gift of geniality to all in his path, and sigh with envy. This is the real deal.

We are told that we are entering a world that will be run by robots. A wag has pointed out that factories in the future will only be inhabited by a man and a dog; the man to feed the dog and the dog to stop the man fiddling with the machines. This may be good news for those reluctant to work but as Noel Coward pointed out “Work is so much more fun than fun.”

The prospect of driverless vehicles appals me. What are all the drivers going to be doing if not driving? Up to mischief staring at a screen, no doubt, deprived of the joys of the wheel and the open road.

We can only hope that in the future our hotels will not be staffed by robotic creatures, but thankfully this is unlikely to happen since a jolly and welcoming host in human form has been established as one of the most vital prerequisites for our leisure time

This was demonstrated to us this week when visiting a new state-of-the-art cinema in Monaghan town where the manager made herself known to us ticket buyers and asked what sort of films we liked. It seemed as if she really cared. Cleverly she had given that neutral space a human face that has sown a seed of loyalty to it in us. How much more so this need to be wanted and acknowledged is essential when staying away, given that the visitor has left behind the comfort blanket of home and familiarity.

The robotic age may be beneficial to the hospitality industry in freeing up a lot of bored and unemployed people able to avail of its services. At a time when our lives are more virtual, more technologically aided, more Smart, what is likely to become more desirable to us than the dear old human visage? And here in Ireland we are off to a roaring start; we actually like people.

We holidayed in France last summer. France is my favourite destination but it is not for the friendliness of its people. Rather the opposite, but this is not without its own perverse charm. A rude host may be preferred to an indifferent one. Visiting Lyon for reasons of gastronomy we chose a restaurant not just for its reported excellent cooking but lured, too, by the alleged rudeness of the chef/patron who operated from what looked like a ticket office added as an afterthought to the side of the dining room.

We were grudgingly shown to a table and scowled at from the booth. However, with maximising his takings in mind, and true to his reputation, he began to shout oaths at two Italian customers who declined to share a table with us and were on the point of leaving. We were assumed to be English, thus suspect Brexiteers and outcasts, and it wasn’t until he discovered we were from Ireland that we were given a cheer and our chef made himself known to us.

I couldn’t see Richard Corrigan behaving like that. You could say that since France is the most popular tourist destination in the world, they don’t have to try very hard, whereas with our questionable weather and inaccessibility, a cheery expression on the face of the host is essential and can turn a disgruntled customer into a loyal visitor.

This is not always easy. I was once called ‘morose’ (dictionary definition reads ‘of bitter, unsociable temperament’) and will confess, in retirement, to lurking behind hedges at the approach of a voice, but for anyone young, and naturally sociable, there can be few more promising career paths to take than in hospitality.

It’s the obvious choice for interacting with others and no matter that you don’t have say, the allure of Tom Hiddleston as The Night Manager, but through the warmth of your interaction, through listening to the woes and joys of the lives of others, through addressing any short-comings the guest may find in your premises, because no matter how good you may think you are at what you do, you are only as good as the perceptions of the person paying for your services. You may find yourself becoming not just a provider but a friend, a psychologist, an entertainer. And you will never be in danger of being replaced by a robot.

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From Tide to Table by Georgina Campbell