People in rural Ireland are meant to be beside themselves with gratitude at the sight of them. Nothing is supposed to please us more than last week's news that visitor numbers are up this year compared to last year (by around 100,000).

Because farm incomes are officially in a nosedive, and now that the state has all but criminalised fishermen, the consensus seems to be that rural life will soon become unsustainable without tourism.

We must all become more like those jarveys in Killarney who have made a virtue out of plamasing yanks.

Teagasc, the department of tourism and Failte Ireland are all "aggressively" promoting rural tourism for us, whether we like it or not. It is to be a lifeline for hard-up farmers everywhere. Throw the cattle out of the bedrooms there, Teresa, till we turn the place into a B&B. And from then on, Teresa will be urged to contemplate how to position herself and her rashers and her nylon sheets in a global marketplace.

Really, what have the tourists ever done for us? They come over here and take all our parking spaces; they're always underdressed, hungry and cranky; they thought it would be fun to cycle 40 miles in one day; they saunter out onto the road in front of your car; they think everyone is trying to fleece them; they forget how to drive, having abandoned their critical faculties somewhere around the Dromoland interchange; they complain about the roads, the prices and the weather until you find yourself, idiotically, standing up for the motherland; and . . . hang on, there's a bandwagon trundling past . . .they burn up a scandalous amount of fossil fuel to get here.

They are said to contribute cash to the local economy, a statement that deserves to be picked to pieces. For a start, tourists usually begin and end their journeys in towns. They speed past rural houses on their way to the next area of outstanding natural beauty, so they can say they've seen it.

If you're not providing an amenity, you're invisible to a tourist.

And if and when they do stop, where do they spend their cash? It goes to the local pub/shop/restaurant/B&B, all of which are very often under one roof. You might wish your enterprising neighbour every success, but you neither want nor expect to benefit from their success. You'd have to be a slavish disciple of trickledown theory to believe the prosperity of a rural B&B can help get a nearby elderly bachelor farmer off the breadline. B&B owners have nowhere to spend their money, after all, but in town.

Then there's the tax take. According to Failte Ireland, for every euro spent by out-of-state tourists, 52 cent eventually ends up with the government (through VAT, excise duty, PAYE and so on).

That would be a nice little earner for the taxpayer if the government were to spend 52 cent out of every rural tourist euro on supplying rural Ireland with a few much-needed facilities . . . a bus service would be nice, for example, or a local ambulance . . . but of course it doesn't. (And no, filling the potholes with gravel from time to time isn't enough. ) The argument that tourism creates jobs doesn't hold water either: providing seasonal, low-paid jobs for local teenagers isn't enough to stop the teenagers having to quit rural Ireland the first chance they get to make a decent living elsewhere.

Tourism places an unreasonable burden on regional infrastructure and services, which are almost never designed to cope with it; it brings overcrowding, traffic congestion and litter; it can inflate rural land values beyond the reach of residents; it invites unsightly holiday home development . . . because of course rural Ireland is governed by psychotic planners; it endangers wildlife habitats; it pollutes. And just as regrettable as all that, it encourages a soulless view of the countryside, in which cliffs and beaches and local history and local humour become commodities. It's worth bearing in mind the drawbacks while the state compels all rural dwellers to regard themselves as golden geese.