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'and especially in Switzerland' (
Irish Tourist
3
[May 1896], p. 23). It offered Ireland an exam-
ple of how scenery could be marketed and
consumed - to the advantage of rural inhabit-
ants, landlords and the state. Irish tourist-
development advocates alluded repeatedly to
Switzerland in plotting Ireland's path to improve-
ment, presenting the Alpine country's sector as
more advanced, but implicitly asserting that
impediments to the Irish sector's development
were surmountable, and never citing its political
independence as a factor in development.
The assertion that essential differences
between the two countries centred not on quali-
ties in the landscapes, but on the quality of tour-
ist amenities, also implied that the Irish sector
could be raised to the Swiss standard. This was
conveyed in popular images of the professional
Swiss waiter and his rustic, untrained Irish coun-
terpart. At an April 1895 meeting at which the
ITA was organized, the Lord Lieutenant, Lord
Houghton, expressed hope that 'some day a
race of waiters and other attendants will be
established, such as we see in Germany and
Switzerland, who are gifted with a sort of preter-
natural alertness' (
Irish Tourist
2 ['New Series',
1895], p. 20). The image of the professional
Swiss waiter served as a foil for Ireland's second-
rate counterpart - 'Boots', a permanent emplo-
yee of the hotel who, as a 'native of the district',
was portrayed in guidebooks as earnest and
well-intentioned, but also a hallmark of the
hotel's 'Irish' character - the adjective signifying
standards which fell below those that prevailed
in England, Scotland and the continent (Cooke,
1896, pp. 12-13; Baddeley, 1892, pp. xii-xiii;
The Times
, 6 September 1884).
The broader comparative evaluation that
underlay images of Swiss and Irish hotels, and
contrasts between the professional waiter and
folksy Boots, was premised on Ireland's pros-
pects for emulating Switzerland and, like that
small country, capturing a lucrative share of the
British tourist market (Tissot, 1995).
The Times
(14 August 1905) lamented that English tourists
possessed a far 'less intimate' acquaintance with
Killarney and Connemara than they did with
'Switzerland and the Tyrol'. 'The attractions of
scenery are now looked upon as a valuable
commercial asset in many countries;' the news-
paper contended, 'not only in Switzerland, where
the fi gures representing profi t are gigantic, in
Italy, Tyrol, and the South of France, but in the
New World, in Australasia, and the East.'
Against this array of competitors, the Irish sec-
tor's proponents faced the challenge of formu-
lating images of its landscapes that encoded
'continental' comfort. Hence they developed
myriad markers which transposed continental
European sites in Ireland. In response to the
vexing question of why tourists study 'scenery
in Norway, Switzerland or even the Highlands
of Scotland' when as much beauty was on offer
in Ireland, tourist development promoters
arrived at one conclusion. As the
Irish Tourist
put it pithily, 'Many have been deterred from
travelling, by the evil character borne by Irish
hotels' (3 [May 1896], p. 1). Their improvement
would betoken the dawn of Ireland as a touring-
ground, where British visitors could visit Ireland
as comfortably - and as regularly - as they did
Switzerland. Indeed, in 1903 the
Irish Tourist
mischievously suggested that, amid recent
reports of Alpine tourist deaths, visitors to the
Emerald Isle would have their efforts repaid
both in comfort and safety:
The list of Alpine disasters continues its ghastly
career. It is nothing short of suicidal for tourists
to attempt these mad Swiss excursions,
particularly when here in Ireland we have
scenery, including mountain and cliff, before
which the white Alps seem like a cheap
diorama. Why go to Switzerland and get
dashed down a fathomless abyss when you can
scale the cliffs of Moher and risk little but a
broken rib or two? I have nothing to say against
Swiss hotels, they are admirable, from the
palatial mansions of Geneva to the comfortable
hydro of Davoz Platz. But here we have good
hotels too, and quite as moderate as those of
Switzerland - and besides, we have no glaciers.
(
Irish Tourist
1 [August 1903], p. 1)
In comparisons of Irish tourist development,
Switzerland was situated as a 'rival' whose sin-
gular advantage over Ireland lay in the quality
of her services and amenities. To advocates of
the Irish sector's 'improvement', she served
both as a foil for narratives of Ireland's back-
wardness, and as a harbinger of Ireland's poten-
tial transformation under their stewardship.
Rather than developing a wider political inter-
pretation for the economic and commercial
backwardness of the Irish sector premised on a
critique of the union with Great Britain, tourism
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