The people of Tullamore, Co Offaly, have just discovered that naming their heritage centre after a famous drink associated with the town may cost them more than £400,000 in lost grants.
They want to call it the Tullamore Dew Heritage Centre, after the well-known tipple.
But a sub-committee in Bord Failte dealing with EU grants want them to drop the Dew.
The case of the "dewdrop" has excited local passions in Tullamore in recent weeks and Bord Failte is being blamed by local councillors for the pressure to drop the "Dew" from the title.
But yesterday a Bord Failte spokesman said it is being wrongly accused by local councillors. He said the demand for the name change is coming from the Management Board for Product Development, an independent group set up in 1994 to vet EU funding.
"We merely do the secretarial work for this body which is totally independent and was set up to adjudicate on applications involving EU funding," said the spokesman.
He said the sub-committee was in contact with the local proposers of the centre in an effort to find a solution to the problem. He said he was sure a compromise could be reached.
The problem surfaced only recently after the proposers of the development had been given agreement in principle that they would receive £437,000 for the scheme under the Heritage Town Theme Programme.
The sub-committee is insisting that the project's name should reflect the fact that it is being supported under the Heritage Town Theme.
The proposers include Tullamore Urban District Council, Offaly County Council, the Midlands Regional Tourism Organisation, local heritage and environmental groups and the drinks company C&C.
When local councillors discovered that they could not include the word Dew in the title, one of them, Mr John Flanagan, accused Bord Failte of "pussy-footing".
He said that they were doing so because some "whiz-kid up in Dublin does not like Tullamore Dew". The situation was ridiculous, he said.
Tourism industry sources indicated last night that the Bord Failte subcommittee is faced with the problem that the level of grants available to local and voluntary bodies under the scheme is higher than that for projects involving commercial firms.