On a train from Cork to Dublin recently, I was reminded of our current obsession with foreign travel, writes John G O'Dwyer.
A young man from Kerry, sitting opposite, enquired where I was bound. When I told him I was merely heading to Belfast he remarked: "You know, I've visited Australia, Peru, Russia and Thailand, but I've never been north of Drogheda."
These days it seems the whole country is coming down with exotic-holiday fever. International travel out of Ireland has doubled in the past decade and last year we made four-and-a-half million leisure trips overseas. A century ago our great-grandparents - if they were lucky enough to go on holiday - got to sample the drizzly delights of the Irish seaside. In the 1960s, the ultimate status symbol was a Costa-acquired tan. As a student a quarter-century ago, the best I could boast about were three underfunded, undernourished weeks inter-railing around Europe.
Now such modest adventures have become passé. Travel status, these days, attaches only to long-haul and exotic destinations. A college degree is likely to to be followed by an overseas gap year, while colourful undertakings such as conquering the Inca Trail, ascending Kilimanjaro or diving on the Great Barrier Reef are now within the reach of all age-groups and have come to very much represent the spirit of our era.
And perhaps this is to be expected. Since the Celtic Tiger arrived more than a decade ago and squatted snugly into our lives, we can afford to visit ever more distant locations, to search out strange cultures and seek landscapes unknown. And as our horizons broaden and pockets deepen, traditional resorts such as Ballybunion, Bundoran and latterly Benidorm and Benalmadena have been losing out to the attraction of the world's most distant and previously inaccessible locations.
Conventional wisdom holds that such travel is a good thing. It allows for cross-cultural education and the safety valve of an escape from daily pressures. It makes us think faster and imagine more widely and opens our minds to new ideas and ways of living.
But the necessary air travel to reach distant destinations is made possible only by the present availability of relatively cheap oil, coupled with the fact that aviation fuel mostly remains untaxed.
Global tourism tourism has become a two edged sword. On one side it facilitates cross-cultural understanding and transfers scarce resources from affluent to more impoverished areas; on the other, it uses up valuable fossil-based fuel and increases greenhouse gas emissions in the upper atmosphere. We are now approaching - or maybe already at - the peak of oil production. In the future the energy required for world travel won't gush conveniently from the ground - some of it must be grown or manufactured and will be far more expensive to produce.
This Thursday has been designated as World Tourism Day, when we are being asked by the United Nations to "reflect on the social, cultural, political and economic value of global tourism". Less likely to be highlighted, however, are the costs associated with the exponential expansion of international travel. Worldwide there were 842 million visits abroad in 2006 and the World Tourism Organisation is optimistic that this figure will reach almost 1.5 billion by 2020.
But is such growth in air transportation sustainable? While the aviation industry argues that air travel accounts for only 2 per cent of CO2 emissions worldwide, it ignores the inconvenient reality that levels of emissions in the developed world are far higher. And these discharges occur high in the atmosphere where they have a greater effect than emissions at ground level. The present explosion of low-cost flying means that aviation is now the fastest growing source of CO2.
With world oil resources depleting rapidly and international obligations now requiring governments to restrict greenhouse emissions it is difficult to see how we can continue with our effortless and spendthrift rambling of the globe. It seems certain that carbon quota obligations and pressure from the green lobby will, sooner or later, force governments to make air travel less attractive. This may be done by imposing punitive taxes on the aviation industry or - perhaps more politically acceptable - by maintaining cheap fares but rationing air travel. And, if the latter is the case, we may eventually be required to first offset our carbon emissions before being allowed the luxury of long-haul travel.
Whatever the outcome, it is now a racing certainty that our generation will be the first and also the last to enjoy unrestricted and inexpensive worldwide access. There is also a strong likelihood that, in the future, we will again see large numbers of Irish families holidaying yearly in resorts such as Ballybunion, Bundoran and Bangor. Could it be that this time round, such holidays will be located in specially constructed eco-friendly resorts designed to offset enough carbon footprint to accumulate the required air-miles for a "once in a lifetime" trip to the United States?