Chapter 7 Power, Knowledge and Tourguiding: The Construction of Irish Identity on Board County Wicklow Tour Buses

Tourism industries construct and communicate images of the cultural, ethnic and national identities of host populations, images which are repro duced in brochures, guidebooks and in the language of tour guides. Such representations are attempts at attracting foreign visitors to holiday desti nations by portraying these as exotic, mysterious or in other ways different from the every-day lives of potential travellers. In doing this, however, tourism imagery may also creates a sense of 'othemess', of difference between the intended audience, the tourists and the people and culture of the destination country (see, for example, O'Barr, 1994). Irish tourism imagery can be seen as a discourse on Ireland and Irish identity, which it constructs by selectively representing certain features of Irish culture, while dismissing others. Whereas media researchers have long acknowl edged the need to examine audience readings of messages found in mass media, no attention has so far been paid to how Irishness is understood by foreign visitors during their holiday in the country. This chapter seeks to address the lack of attention to tourist interpretations by offering a prelimi nary exploration of how Irish identity is constructed on one-day tours to Glendalough in County Wicklow, not only by the tour guides, but also by the tourists themselves.) The Tourisf(ic) Gaze Urry has illustrated how the Foucauldian notion of a constructive, powerful gaze can be applied to the tourist experience. He argues that such a tourist gaze stems from expectations of (visual) pleasure and experiences out of the ordinary, which are constructed and 'endlessly reproduced' through various mass media and objectified in the tourism imagery (Urry