Waiter, waiter, there’s a fly in my soup! It’s the opening line of a zillion gags about bad restaurants. In the jokes, a supercilious waiter responds to the diner’s complaint with elaborate justifications for the bug’s presence in the meal. Remarkably, this also appears to be the customer service policy of the major-domos at Failte Ireland.

Last week the national tourism body, in response to persistent complaints by overseas visitors and native consumers about rip-off prices in Irish restaurants, announced plans for a study into the cost of eating out — although it looks more like an attempt to cook up a potful of excuses.

The €50,000 study will examine pricing from the restaurant sector’s perspective, and analyse the cost of overheads such as raw materials, labour and utilities. There will also be a quantification of the “regulatory burden” — costs associated with the hospitality industry’s pesky obligation to avoid poisoning its patrons.

In press statements, representatives of Failte Ireland acknowledged that repeated visitor surveys reveal “a level of dissatisfaction” with restaurant prices; the body bemoaned the lack of scientific scrutiny in this area, and dismissed media debate as ill-informed. The trouble, it claimed, stems from concerns about a “perceived” lack of value.

This is a curious position for any tourism body — particularly one charged with marketing magical, mystical Ireland. Our tourist industry is built on perception: Ireland’s carefully confected image as a quaint, bucolic and friendly idyll. The marketeers have sold the sizzle, not the steak. In our tourist trade, perception is reality; if restaurant customers believe they’re being overcharged for the product they receive, then they are. Using selective statistics to convince them otherwise is as pointless as using geological analysis to promote the Blarney Stone.

With its long experience of defending the indefensible, the restaurant trade will undoubtedly mount a vigorous justification of its prices. The Failte Ireland study will be eagerly seized upon by the sector as yet another opportunity to showcase its multiple grumbles, many of which are rooted in reality. Ireland is an expensive country in which to do business, with utility costs in particular rising at an alarming rate. Too much explaining of any problem, however, eventually sounds like an attempt at explaining it away.

Not all Irish restaurants are flagrant rip-off joints, and those that aren’t provide the most damning indictment of those that are. There’s also more to the hospitality industry’s rip-off culture than high prices alone. What enrages many customers is the sneaky way in which some restaurants fatten up their bills: the obscenely expensive mineral water, the grotesque wine mark-ups, the hidden cover charges, the compulsory service charges, and so on. If restaurateurs are only interested in turning an honest buck, then why the subterfuge?

Unless questions such as these are explored by the Failte Ireland study, the venture can only be seen as a PR exercise. The tourist body’s claim that there has been no empirical examination of restaurant prices is disingenuous. As recently as 2006, the government’s Tourism Action Plan Implementation Group published a report that found rampant “opportunistic pricing” in the hospitality trade. Spending €50,000 to highlight this reality rather than downplay it would be a much more useful deployment of resources.

In a year when the weak US dollar, the international credit crunch and atrocious weather have combined to depress Irish tourism, Failte Ireland should be working harder to make the case for consumers, not service providers.

If Ireland’s hospitality industry doesn’t get its act together, the erstwhile land of a hundred thousand welcomes will soon become the land of a hundred thousand excuses — a punchline to the waiter, waiter gag that nobody will find funny.

Where's the class?

Treating an entire social class as a single-willed entity with a uniform world view is always patronising. Yet this is what Fintan O'Toole did last week by presenting Kenny Egan’s Olympic silver as one in the eye for citizens who don’t share the boxer’s working-class background.

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