ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some of the groups and individuals involved in Irish tourism development since 1923. It discusses tourism is a point of negotiation, a nexus, where various notions of national identity. Simplifying tourism to a collection of stock images, which allegedly illustrate the nation's sense of itself, ignores that a variety of factors are often behind the inclusion of a photograph in a guidebook or a regional emphasis in tourism promotions – factors that are not necessarily made clear by textual analysis of guidebooks or tourism advertising. Despite the dire physical and psychological condition of post-Civil War Ireland, the Irish Tourist Association emerged in 1924 as an energetic and self-confident national voluntary organisation based on the idea that, if developed with wholehearted enthusiasm, tourism would serve as a harbinger of modernity and economic prosperity. The variety of 'voices' involved virtually assured a vigorous debate about precisely how Ireland would be presented.
