What's a 'Guinny guinny blum blums'? More than you'd think

OF ALL THE lines in Tourism Ireland’s “escape the madness” viral hit, Chris O’Dowd’s savouring of a “Guinny guinny blum blums” is perhaps the most winning and clever. It’s exclaimed over a shot of the ad’s hero ordering a pint of stout. He’s just won his “race” from London to Ireland over a bloke who had been trying to get to his London office, although it’s clear that the results have been fáiltefied.

It doesn’t claim to be cinema verité. So we could spend the next 700 words analysing its veracity. We could complain about how he flies to Waterford’s small airport rather than busy, transport-shackled Dublin. We could point out the continuity errors in the office worker’s route.

We could point out, as several people have already done, that a driver’s licence will not get you to Ireland if you fly Ryanair but instead leave you sitting in the departure lounge as Michael O’Leary’s flying kneecap-squisher takes off.

So we won’t do that.

Instead, let’s look at “Guinny guinny blum blums”, which ranks as one of the smartest lines of dialogue in recent Irish advertising, meeting the challenge of how to mention a brand without mentioning a brand.

You can bet that, hearing that line, the marketing people at Murppy murppy nom nom and Beamy beamy yum yum will have felt as flat as a pint of stout poured by a London barman.

But the line also represents something else significant about the ad: the patina of comic cool appearing over an ad that hits pretty much every note of good old-fashioned Irish tourist marketing.

It may do it with self-declared knowing – “classic sheep shot!” as our heroes shoos sheep off a country road – but it’s doing it all the same. Never more so than when this forward-thinking ad ends up exactly where most Irish tourist ads end up, with a pint in the hand and a tourist cliche in the head.

So while the ad challenges the idea of Irish marketing campaigns, it has no interest in challenging the idea of Ireland itself. (Arguably, its only challenge is to the idea of a young male British tourist: he’d be more likely to be seen doing rock the boat in Temple Bar than on the Passage East ferry.)

It wasn’t always like this. For a little risk, go to the early days of Irish tourist marketing.

In the 1950s the tourist board’s magazine Ireland of the Welcomes was on the one hand traditional in focusing on that most solid of Irish representations: this island of words and writers. Yet, as Michael Cronin explained a decade ago in Irish Tourism: Image, Culture and Identity, in its contributions from the likes of Seán Ó Faoláin, Benedict Kiely and Brendan Behan, it ran articles that challenged the orthodoxy. They got away with it because their authenticity enhanced the image being sold.

Tourism marketing developed from there, gradually evolving a notion of Ireland as what Cronin called a timeless Arcadia.

The “encounter with the native”, now such a staple of Irish tourist ads, was created and established, even if today’s context is somewhat different.

Then it was about bridging the apparent gap between the middle-class British visitor and the native. For the “debased physical realities to be subsumed into a more prestigious frame of reference”, the idea of the noble Irish native and his culture was developed.

So today on Discover Ireland’s YouTube channel you’ll also find video postcards from around Ireland. One for Galway shows tourists meeting a haggard Man of Aran type in his cottage, followed by somewhat bizarre shots of a group of people in old dress sitting in the open, all threaded by ridiculously exaggerated notions of simple pleasure.

Updating the platform, then, does not change the message. This week Discover Ireland GB’s Facebook page featured several prominent pictures, including a variation on the ubiquitous postcard of a sheep and the line “It’s true we have our own traffic problems”. It adds the hashtag “#escapethemadness”.

And while Chris O’Dowd’s voiceover of the Discover Ireland ad has some great lines, and the campaign is fresh and funny and has worked a treat on many levels, the starting point is different, but it still ends up in the Irish Arcadia.

On that Facebook page, below a post showing a man wrestling a goat at Puck Fair, in Killorglin, someone has appropriated a famous Alan Partridge line for this comment: “Dere’s more to Ireland dan dis.”

The viral ad wobbles so much in that perilous balancing act between cool and cliche that it’s easy to imagine it ending on that line too.

@shanehegarty