Short on coastline and short on glamour, Co Leitrim has come in for some stick in its time. Ronan McGreevy, a native of the county, reports on attempts to boost its image.
Dublin native Noeleen Tyrrell had no idea what she let herself in for 13 years ago when she answered an advertisement in Hot Press magazine looking for a singer. She now runs an eco-retreat outside the village of Dromahair overlooking Loch Nahoo in the hills of the North Leitrim Glens.
Ard Nahoo is typical of the myriad of alternative businesses that have made Leitrim home. The north of the county is the epicentre of the Green Box, the mosaic of organic farms, craft shops and eco-friendly B&Bs in the Border area.
"I would like to think that Leitrim is getting a name for being the alternative county. There is so much interesting alternative stuff going on up there, from alternative building, the Organic Centre and us doing this alternative way of living," she says.
It was all so different, though, when she agreed to come to that fateful audition. "The guy on the phone said, 'we're in Leitrim. Is that a problem?'. I said 'not at all'," she remembers.
"I got off the phone and I said, 'where's Leitrim?' I couldn't actually place it. I knew it was out there somewhere. I didn't know anything about it. I had absolutely no perception."
Changing people's perceptions was part of the thinking behind the Leitrim Expo last week at Croke Park.
There was a time when Leitrim, as well as having the shortest coastline, seemed to draw the shortest straw.
John McGahern was fond of saying that when a crow flew over Leitrim it took its lunch with it - and the writer came from the county. And the county's arch-tormentor, Dustin the Turkey, once promised to send a search party to find Leitrim.
Behind the jibes, some good-natured, others ill-informed, lay a kernel of truth. Until 1996, Leitrim was the only county where the population had declined at every census since the Famine.
The turnaround in Leitrim's fortune is reflected in the population increase revealed by the last census - up 3,000, to 28,000. It's an enormous relief for a county so used to losing its people through a lack of opportunity and emigration.
"The last five years have shown phenomenal growth in the county. It's definitely a county that's different from the one that people would have in their minds in the past," says Joseph Gilhooly, from Leitrim County Council.
The increasing optimism in the county will be on show when the €3 million new stand at Páirc Séan Mac Diarmada is officially opened at half-time during the Leitrim-Galway Connacht semi-final on Sunday. It's an impressive symbol, but, as the Leitrim County Development Board's research inside and outside of the county shows, old perceptions die hard.
"Some people still have that outdated feeling about what Leitrim is, but they are usually those who never visited the county, or are going on hearsay," he says.
Leitrim has always attracted writers, such as the Booker Prize-winning author DBC Pierre, and artists seeking inspiration and cheap accommodation. The Leitrim Design House, based in the newly-opened Dock Arts Centre in Carrick-on-Shannon, showcases the work of 80 locally-based artists.
Even in the bad old days the county was known as "Lovely Leitrim", but, as is often said in the west of Ireland, you can't eat scenery, and the things that attract artists don't help those in more conventional employment to make a living.
That too is changing. The presence of multinationals such as the American credit card giant MBNA, which currently employs 1,000 people in Carrick-on-Shannon, is helping to provide job opportunities that were never there before in the county. It recruited 200 people last year alone.
There is now an impressive list of indigenous small firms recruiting, and the county council has offered a €30,000 incentive to entrepreneurs to set up there.
"We're saying there are real jobs on offer in Leitrim," says Joe Lowe, the chief executive officer of the Leitrim County Enterprise Board. "We're now in a position to offer the whole package, which is a good quality of life and a good standard of living."
Despite the recent rise in population, Leitrim needs more people and plenty of them. The population is still only half of what it was at independence, and there is plenty of space to go around. As things stand, a population the size of north Co Dublin's Balbriggan inhabits an area almost twice as big as Co Dublin.
To that end, the presence at the Croke Park exhibition of a trade official from the Chinese embassy was welcomed. Could the solution to Leitrim's under-population come from the world's most populated country? "Expo gave us a chance to introduce people from the embassies and tell them what we are about," says Gilhooly. "We would love to attract all different nationalities to Leitrim. To build on that is the next step."