Across the water, the UK Met Office says spring starts a month later on 1 March. That makes March, April and May the spring months, “for simplicity’s sake”. The UK weather people have June, July and August as summer; September, October and November as autumn; and December, January and February as winter.

Others will tell you that spring starts at the vernal equinox, when the days become as long as the nights.

“Vernal” comes from the Latin word for “bloom”, and “equinox” for “equal night”. But the vernal equinox is on the night of 20-21 March, so that makes the Summer Solstice (21 June) the start of summer. Yet the following day is called Midsummer’s Day.

Then there’s the official start of  “Summer Time” in our time zone – at 2am on the last Sunday in March – i.e. 25 March 2012, when the clocks go forward (or is it back?)

And in southern latitudes, the equinoxes are reversed, so that while Easter is a spring thing in the northern hemisphere it becomes an autumn celebration in Australia, New Zealand, South America, South Africa and so on.

In Ireland, just to be bolshie and different, our spring traditionally starts tomorrow, on 1 February, St Brigid’s Day. It continues until early May (Bealtaine).

Very confusing.

At least with the equinox thing it’s a scientifically fixed date, totally dependent on the angle of the Earth to the Sun and not other things which are sometimes related of course, but which vary quite a bit, such as when the first daffodils appear, or a big bout of frost, or when spring lambs frolic or March hares do whatever they do, or even global warming and climate change.

That way, the four seasons – les quatre saisons – are simply determined by the changing sunlight, which in turn is determined by how our little planet wobbles its way around our nearest star, and the tilt of its axis as it does so. La terre aime le soleil.

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• The 18th Brumaire
• Daylight savings time – le temps perdu
• When France had a 10-day week

The following is a slightly decadent version of an Irish breakfast, though it’s far healthier than “the Big Fry with All the Works”. Basically it’s just scrambled eggs with a smoked salmon twist.

Quick musical aside: even without the fishy angle, scrambled eggs rock. Beatles fans will know that “Scrambled Eggs” was the original title of the Beatles’ “Yesterday”, and here’s a rare moment (sound only, with Spanish subtitles for los aficionados españoles de los Beatles) of  Sir Paul doing his original proper eggy version on the “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” show on NBC…

(Don’t believe us? Here’s the full video version with images – though the sound is a bit dodgy).

Right, enough of the musical asides: without further ado here’s our “smoked salmon scrambled eggs” recipe. Serves two – with the perfect quantities for a Valentine’s Day breakfast…

• 4 to 5 eggs (depending on size) – organic, free range, as fresh as you can
• A small knob of unsalted butter (no, olive oil isn’t quite right)
• A tiny bit of smoked salmon – be conservative, because it can be domineering
• Freshly ground pepper – white rather than black if you’re fussy
• Bread, for toast
• Optional: a tablespoon of cream or crème fraîche (or even natural yoghurt)
• Optional: a couple of chive leaves

Slice the bread. Put on the toaster.

Chop the smoked salmon fairly finely.

Break the eggs into a bowl and beat gently with a fork. Season with pepper (no need for salt because the smoked salmon has more than enough).

Put a small pot or even a frying pan on a moderate heat, add the butter, let it foam gently. Add the smoked salmon for just a few seconds to release some of its oils, but don’t let it brown.

Pour in the egg mixture and make scrambled eggs in the usual way – if you’re not sure how to do scrambled eggs, check Delia Smith’s scrambled eggs tips.

Stir well and take it off the heat while the mixture is still runny but just about to set. This does take a certain knack, in order to get the eggs cooked yet still soft.

Take it off the heat. Add the cream if you want to slow down the cooking process and add a bit of richness. Garnish with finely chopped chives if you fancy. Bon appetit!

Variations

Right, how about doing an en cocotte version of the same? Oeufs en cocotte  (or oeufs cocotte)  involves gently cooking each individual egg in its own buttered ramekin dish (ramequin) in the oven, preferably in a water bath, for about 12 to 15 minutes, with some extra ingredients.

(Minor aside about language: does the English word “coquette” come from “cocotte”?)

Those hidden extras are a brilliant surprise at the bottom of the ramekin dish: usually a slice of ham and a dollop of cream or crème fraîche, with an optional topping of a pinch of grated cheese, along the lines of white cheddar or gruyère.

Instead of ham, try smoked salmon, and maybe skip the cheese. Check out Mrs Multitasker’s Smoked Salmon and Egg Cups recipe.

Hey Carignan, what's your game now - can anybody play?

Once upon a time Carignan was the most widely planted grape on the planet. It was the single most common vine variety planted in France.

Its vines are late budding, ripen late and are highly susceptible to rot and mildew. They favour a hot climate and long, dry growing season – is it any wonder that Carignan became the grape of Languedoc-Roussillon?

Then something happened. It fell out of fashion.

The amount of Carignan vines in the south of France halved during the 1990s. It was overtaken by Merlot.

If you believed some wine experts (and we’re not experts by any means, just wine fans), everything about Carignan – all 100% of it – was absolutely wrong: “too high in acidity”, “rough tannins”, “green and unripe flavours”, “not great for early drinking”, “and doesn’t age well either”.

Carignan became associated with “the kind of wine you could pour into an empty petrol tank in an emergency”, as one English Sunday newspaper harshly put it. Or take the highly respected Jancis Robinson’s verdict:

“Its wine is high in everything — acidity, tannins, colour, bitterness — but finesse and charm. This gives it the double inconvenience of being unsuitable for early consumption yet unworthy of maturation.”

- Jancis Robinson in “The Oxford Companion to Wine”

Carignan vines can be exceptionally productive – sometimes “churning out” (Ms Robinson’s words) 200 hectolitres per hectare – and maybe that was part of  the problem too. Excuse the mixed metaphors, but the Languedoc-Roussillon’s cash cow became the elephant in the room.

As our Twitter friend from Cork, Blake Creedon, so vividly puts it, Carignan was “long regarded as the lantern-jawed ruffian of the wine world, mostly destined for the notorious EU wine lake”. We can’t help thinking of a ruffian and said jaw being tossed into a very large lake.

The gnarled old Carignan bushes began to be replaced by gentler, fruitier, trendier grapes, the “improvers”, the cepages ameliorateurs. Not that Carignan disappeared altogether. There was still plenty around, but now it had a much lower profile. It disappeared into blends – particularly to add acidity to Cinsaut and/or Grenache.

So very brave was the producer who dared to make a 100% varietal Carignan, of all things.

The authorities weren’t against Carignan, not officially, but there were all them EU grants to rip up the old vines, and while many Languedoc-Roussillon producers took the funding on the one hand, very few would be planting new Carignan vines on the other.

The result, by luck perhaps, was that what was left included a lot of very old vines in overlooked corners. And some growers found that the problem wasn’t with the grape per se but with where the vines were planted. Instead of going for big volumes on your best soil, you had a much better wine if it came from these older vines, vines with plenty of character, on extremely poor soils, with much lower yields.

You’d also get better results if you let the grapes ripen properly, and harvest them  late, and store them in older oak barrels, and do the “Edward Scissorhands” thing and prune back your vines very severely every year.

Lo Vièlh and the Carignan fightback

Carignan’s fightback had to come. It seems to be led by a couple of Languedoc vignerons – John Bojanowski, originally from Kentucky, and his French wife Nicole (nee Fernandez).

They run Clos Du Gravillas, a small organic domaine in St Jean de Minervois, on chalky gravel soil just south of the Montagne Noire (Black Mountains). Gravillas means gravel, crushed white gravel chips, or  beaucoup de cailloux. Take it away, John (in French)…

Before becoming winemakers, John was the East European Sales Manager for a supplier of uninterruptible power supply equipment, and Nicole was as an export manager at Terroirs D’Occitanie.

In 1999 Nicole came across two and a half hectares of Carignan vines in their vineyard’s neglected nooks and crannies: vines planted in 1970, 1952 and 1911. Imagine that – some of the vines are now over a century old.

They started to make a 100% Carignan wine, Lo Vièlh (“The Old One” in Occitan). Ask for a glass of it the next time you’re in Le Chameau Ivre in Béziers.

Anyway, John started the Carignans.com website, and in 2004 he organised the first “Carignan World Tasting”, a gathering in Béziers of dozens of local growers, Carignan fans, and (v imporant) some doubting scribes from the international wine press.

As Ryan O’Connell explains on his blog, “Now, there’s a safe community where growers can come out of the Carignan closet and admit to the world and to themselves that it is a great grape when grown right.”

And when it’s treated right, a 100% Carignan is superb: silky smooth, easygoing, with great depth and flavours, from black olives to coffee and dark chocolate and a hint of tobacco.

OK, Carignan is an underdog, a workhorse rather than a racing stallion. Yet what’s wrong with workhorses? This one is a strong and sturdy and a perfect reflection of its perfect terroir.

It can also be great value in Irish shops: take the “Rare Vineyards Carignan Vieilles Vignes” from the Hérault, which has been appearing in Superquinn in recent times for as little as €6 a bottle (apologies to specialist wine merchants: we’ve only seen it in the supermarket giants, so if you too have some good 100% Carignans, please give yourselves a nice big plug in the comments box below).

Mind you, the labels for this particular “Rare Vineyards” wine try to press all the right marketing buttons (“terroir”, “garrigue” etc) in a contrived sort of way, in clumsy English that seems  deliberately so…

“Made of a forgotten Languedoc grape” (Of? from?)
“Grown on rare vineyards” (On? in?)
“Located in far away valleys” (Far away from where? Narbonne? Carcassonne? Termonfeckin?)
“This Carignan old vines expresses all its true characteristics enhanced by its ‘garrigue” terroir aromas” (Buttons. Being. Pressed)
“The wine richness and concentration will transport you through the 40 years age vines…” (Sorry?)

It’s a pity too that (unlike Lo Vièlh etc) these labels are ever so vague about who produced it, and where exactly these Rare Vineyards are located. All us consumers can work out is that it’s bottled in a 34360 postcode, maybe around Pardailhan near St Chinian.

It’s easy to make your own, and in our house we do it one of two ways: either in a lemony brine or in olive oil (we might even try rapeseed oil next winter).

Brine is cheaper, though you don’t get the benefit of the flavoured oil. Some recipes also insist that you remove the pulp (interior flesh), but it’s “waste not, want not” in the Evening Hérault HQ so we don’t bother.

Both these recipes involve five or six fat lemons (preferably with the leaves attached), and you’ll need a large, sterilised, airtight jar such as a one-pint Kilner pot.

And both recipes need plenty of coarse sea salt. Never table salt, which is far too chemical and harsh.

Recipe #1: Preserved lemons in brine

• Lemons
• Sea salt
• Spices (e.g. fennel seed, cumin seed, coriander seed, peppercorns, a couple of bay leaves, a cinnamon stick, perhaps a pinch of dried chili)

Mix the spices and salt in a bowl.

Cut a cross into each lemon so that you quarter it almost to the base, but so that the quarters still hold together.

Rub plenty of the salt mix into the lemon segments, then reshape the fruit.

Put a tablespoon of the salt into the bottom of the jar.

Pack the lemons as tightly as you can into the jar (the more tightly, the less salt you’ll need), pressing the lemons down to release their juices and sprinkling more salt/spices on them as you go along.

If the juice released from the squashed fruit doesn’t cover them, add some freshly squeezed lemon juice. Leave a little air space before sealing the jar. Seal. Put them away for a month for the preserving process to do its work.

To use, take out the lemons as you need them, and rinse well under running water.

Recipe #2: Preserved lemons in oil

• Lemons
• Sea salt
• Plain olive oil

Wash the lemons, quarter them as in the above recipe.

Roll them in the salt and stuff them tightly in the jar. Leave it overnight in the fridge.

The next day, take the lemons out of the jar, and drain them in a colander for 15 minutes. Rinse the jar, rub it dry with kitchen towel.

Half fill the jar with the olive oil. Shake the lemons to remove excess salt and place them in the jar. Top up with more oil and make sure the lemons are well covered. Seal.

Again, leave for a month before using. The oil itself can also be used in cooking – for example, to flavour a fish dish or a tajine.

Alternatives – preserved oranges

In each case the lemons will be ready in a month, and will last for at least a year.

The same techniques should work perfectly well if you have a glut of oranges or limes, though we’ve still to come across dishes that involve them lads.

There are so many ways to have beetroot – and just some of them are fresh and raw, steamed, boiled, baked or fried.

Beetroot adores strong flavours, such as smoked mackerel with rocket leaves in a lemon juice and olive oil dressing, and a blob of horseradish sauce.

Or why not try…

1. Ultra-thin slices – so thin that they are almost transparent – of raw beetroot with smoked salmon and a Dijon mustard sauce
2. Thinly sliced beetroot, caramelised in a frying pan with cumin seeds and a reduced balsamic vinegar sauce.
3. “Beetroot boxty”: grated beetroot and grated raw potato, feta cheese, a raw egg and dill. Shape the mix into balls or cakes, and fry – it’s our veggie answer to a fishcake.
4. Or Shawandar bi’l-Laban – with yoghurt, garlic paste and mint in an Arab dish popular in Lebanon and Palestine. Check out Clifford A. Wright’s splendid recipe.
5. Or beetroot, carrot and parsnip crisps (chips as our North American cousins would say). Use a mandoline – rather than a mandolin – to slice the root veg very thinly, and lightly douse with sea salt before frying in hot oil for about two minutes until they are crisp.
6. Or Elizabeth David’s beetroot consommé
7. Or beetroot risotto – a vivid crimson dish with a splash of vodka, a good fist of fresh dill and soured cream: basically add your grated beetroot with the vodka (or white wine) after frying the arborio rice
8. Or in baking. We’ve already raved about beetroot bread, but don’t forget to try grated beetroot in chocolate muffins and other cakes for a wonderfully moist and fudgy texture and taste. Here’s Nigel Slater’s chocolate beetroot cake with crème fraîche and poppy seeds
9. Or… beetroot ice cream. Yes, beetroot is perfect in many desserts
10. You can even make your own pickled beetroot, and it’s nothing like the harsh malt pickle stuff in the supermarket.

Pickled beetroot recipe

One simple way to make a homemade pickle is to simmer the beets whole, in a mild wine or cider vinegar with four times as much water and a pinch of salt, sliced garlic and a finely chopped chili.

Once the beetroot is cooked, pat it dry and allow to cool slightly, then peel and slice it and put the slices in jars with the marinade mixture.

And don’t forget beetroot as the central star of a fruity chutney, hummus (though you can skip the tahini in that particular recipe), beetroot wine or chapati

Italian chef Antonio Carluccio is a big champion of beetroot, and he recently devoted half an hour of A BBC TV programme to its wonders. His recipes included this intriguing souffle, with an anchovy sauce. We must try it soon.

Some 2,000 of the famous platanes or plane trees along the Canal du Midi have a fatal disease. So they need to be felled and replaced by disease-resistant ones.

The big cranes and cutters have arrived at Villeneuve-Lès-Béziers, which would be about half-way between Béziers and the ocean. All very sad.

Related posts

• Canal du Midi to lose 2,000 trees

It was the finger-staining, throat-cutting beetroot that would lord it over the rest of a “salad” along the lines of…

1. Cos lettuce (very limp)
2. Egg (v. hardboiled)
3. Scallions (thick)
4. Tomato (three halves)
5. A big dollop of “dressing” (i.e. Heinz Salad Cream)

No wonder many Irish people still have an aversion to “the beetroot”.

But what about real beetroot (betterave in French, an biatas in Irish), the stuff you cook yourself (or even buy ready cooked and vacuum packed)?

Real beetroot really is a  different animal. It’s sweet, earthy, low in calories, and rich in antioxidants including betanin (which is also used as a food dye).

Beetroot is a trendy superfood for the likes of Italian chef Antonio Carluccio – he’s nothing less than a beetroot beatnik. It’s even becoming a cliché in many Irish restaurants now, as the starter with goats’ cheese. And what a lovely cliché it is. So let’s not call it a cliché – it’s a classic. Of the beet generation.

Roast beetroot recipe

Our favourite, simple way to cook beetroot is to roast it. It may look unpromising at the start, but bear with us – the finished dish is gorgeous.

Scrub the beets (try not to break the skin) and put them on a baking dish with some whole cloves of fat garlic and a few sprigs of fresh thyme.

Sprinkle with rapeseed oil, cover it with foil and place in a hot oven (about 180C) and bake for 45 minutes to an hour (depending on size) until tender. (Take the garlic out if it looks like it’s about to burn.)

Let them cool down until you can just about handle them, and here’s the fun bit: peel them under running water in the sink. The skin should slip off very easily. This also means your fingers won’t get stained. You can also slice off any remains of the leafy top, and pinch off the tail if it stlll has one.  Eat warm, or cold, with what you fancy.

For example, serve thinly sliced or cubed with a few salad leaves, a teaspoon of finely chopped herbs (thyme or mint), walnuts or hazelnuts (lightly toasted), a sprinkle of extra virgin olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, just a tiny streak of good honey and – oh, nearly forgot – some creamy (not chalky) goat’s cheese.

More beetroot recipes soon…

What does it make you think of – Ennio Morricone? “Pet Sounds”? Flamingos in the Camargue? Sit back, relax, enjoy…

Our numerous authorities, regulators and enforcement agencies turn a blind eye to this big rip-off and public safety issue.

Not that it’s a particularly Irish problem – there are thousands of litres of fake Italian EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil) swishing around in French hypermarchés, and the shelves of their UK and US counterparts too.

Despite the ”Italian extra-virgin” label, it’s more likely to be cheap low-grade stuff, with artificial colouring and who knows what from god knows where. It could even be lampante (“olio lampante” is Italian for lamp oil), and just calling it “Italian” is a lie on two out of five bottles.

So how can all these supermarket chains, shops and suppliers get away with all this?

How come the olive oil business has brought a stench of corruption to our kitchen cupboards? Why are we still lapping up this low-grade snakeoil at high-grade prices?

How is it that the Mafia in the US are said to make more money from fake olive oil than from cocaine?

Why aren’t our food safety people and MEPs and consumers shouting from the rooftops? And how does the Evening Hérault  know all this?

#1: The sums don’t add up

First of all,  demand for EVOO  has rocketed in the past decade, yet olives don’t just grow on trees (as it were). Trees can’t appear overnight to satisfy that exponential demand.

There’s far more stuff labelled Italian EVOO in the shops than all the olive growers in Italy could possibly have produced in that time. It’s ever so reminiscent of the Hérault’s pinot noir wine scandal.

#2: Food origin labelling is a farce

The scams also exploit a food labelling trick that’s not strictly illegal but basically bamboozles us poor European consumers.

Technically speaking, the label is correct. Your oil may indeed have been “packed” in Italy, it may have travelled across “Italy” just long enough to qualify as “Italian”, to get that nice Italian flag on it. But in between all those quotation marks we have a monumental labelling con.

The frauds also involve rusty tanker ships with hundreds of tons of hazelnut oil or sunflower oil that tootle around the Med just outside Italy, then pop into an Italian port and quickly unload their shady cargo, which undergoes a magic transubstantion into expensive “olive” oil.

This scandal involves dodgy ship captains, conniving customs officials, unscrupulous olive-oil producers,  bent politicians, millions of euros in EU subsidies being misappropriated, and a food labelling system that is plain daft.

#3: It’s waaay too cheap

If you saw a chicken in your local supermarket labelled “Organic”, “Free-range” and (we’re exaggerating here but…) “Corn-fed” and the price tag says “Only €3″, you’d be suspicious, right?

It could only mean one of three things. Either the farmer is giving them away. Or the shelf-stackers were on the jar last night and making an almighty cockup with the barcode labeller thing this morning. Or this food product is a fake.

Organic, free-range, corn-fed birds take time and money to raise, so somebody is lying here.

Similarly, if your Italian EVOO is that cheap, be very suspicious. Is it really made from crushed olives, not refined in any way by chemical solvents or high heat? At €2.50 for 5ooml? When the real thing takes around €3 to produce? Again, the sums don’t add up.

#4: The extra virgin taste test

What’s the oil actually like? Is it peppery and bitter, does it taste and smell of olives, fresh and fruity, with not a hint of mustiness? What colour is it? A glowing green or insipid yellow?

We don’t need to be experts, but we need to trust our senses more than the text on a jar.

Is this the kind of liquid sunshine that a real Italian restaurant will serve up in a ramekin with some crusty bread while taking your orders, and you’re so in heaven that you tell the waiter to skip the next course for a minute and just give us another baguette and a top-up of that lovely oil?

Why do we keep failing the taste test? Can you blame us? Some of us  grew up in 1960s Ireland, when the nearest we got to olive oil was Popeye the Sailor’s girlfriend, Olive Oyl. Olive oil was like a banned substance – the only place to buy it was in the chemists, next to the castor oil.

Today olive oil seems to have been liberated, or so we thought. Yet  we put up with all this adulterated rubbish. Maybe it’s a knowledge gap, which is understandable, or maybe we do know better but we keep following the labels like lemmings and ignore our noses, our eyes and our tastebuds. And the olive oil scammers exploit these gaps.

#5: We’ve been reading ‘Extra Virginity’

“Extra Virginity”,  a new book about the scandal, grew out of American writer Tom Mueller’s Letter from Italy” articles in the excellent New Yorker magazine five years ago.

At one level it deals with olive oil’s rich history as a driving force in Mediterranean culture and society.

“A jug of olive oil on the dinner table marked the triumph of Roman cuisine over barbarian beer and lard,” he writes. The ancient Greeks used it as “fuel, skin lotion, contraceptive, detergent, preservative, pesticide, perfume, and adornment, as well as a cure for heart ailments, stomach aches, hair loss, flatulence, and excessive perspiration.”

“How long have readers been waiting for a book like this? A century? A millennium? Finally, the earth’s most poetic food has found its storyteller. Essential, smart, and ridiculously overdue.”
- Bill Buford, author of “Heat”

Mueller, who lives with his family in Liguria in northern Italy, argues that olive oil is the dividing line between Mediterranean civilisation and “barbarian” cultures:

“When the Germanic tribes of northern and eastern Europe over-ran the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, they revolutionized its culinary fashions and brought the revenge of animal fat on imperial oil. These woodland hunters and pastoralists, who dressed in skins and furs instead of linen togas and silken tunics, introduced a Germanic nouvelle cuisine based not on the Greco-Roman triad of bread, wine and olive oil but on meat, beer and animal fat.”

Tom Mueller's "Extra Virginity": a major exposé of slippery dealings

There’s a bit in the book where he talks to Flavio Zaramella, a Milanese olive oil taster who is fighting the corrupt practices in the industry, and Flavio holds up a bottle blanketed in claims such as “100% Italian”, “Cold-pressed”, “Extra virgin”. He shakes his head and says “‘Extra virgin? What’s this oil got to do with virginity? This is a whore.”

One olive oil producer tells Mueller that half the olive oil now sold in the States is fake. The scam not just about fooling us about the origin – there’s nothing wrong with good  olive oil from Spain, Greece, Morocco or Syria (yes, it’s the fourth biggest producer in the world).

It’s about taking advantage of various chinks in the food chain. Chinks that only came about in modern olive oil production, in our own lifetimes. Wine production, by contrast, is old and almost fossilised, as it were.

Wine production vs oil production

Take the local vignerons around our village. They grow their raw ingredients in their vineyards, harvest them every September, take it all back to the cave in their little trailers, press the juice, store, ferment, and basically control the entire process right through to the bottling (or one of them rents a mobile bottling plant).

Admittedly they now use tractors or tall harvesting machines and stainless steel vats, and some of them may have done “The EU-funded Course”. Yet, underneath it all, even allowing for all the modernisation of recent years, these winemakers are basically applying some relatively new technologies and techniques within an ancient and still very self-contained process. You still make the stuff yourself, 100%.

By comparison, the olive trees involve ancient farming methods and and nets, then it’s off to the processing plant, and it’s now out of your hands, and we’re in the world of stainless steel milling and industrial techniques that only arrived in the 1960s and 1970s. And that’s just the start of it.

Making extra-virgin olive oil in this way turns it into something far more valuable than “ordinary” vegetable oils. This also makes it costly and time-consuming to produce, and you don’t control the milling bit.

And somewhere along the way between the Italian (or alleged Italian) farm and our local supermarket it’s relatively easy to doctor this bottle in one way or another, and this doctoring pays big time. It leads to a bizarre situation where journalists like Tom Mueller have to interview undercover cops in hushed tones, as if we were talking about black-market weapons grade plutonium rather than olive oil.

The story drags in some big household brands (Nestlé, Unilever, Bertolli) and much of it takes place – though Mueller doesn’t go into this – within the wider political culture in Italy of, well, Silvio Berlusconi.

If we are to stop this huge international food scandal, the first thing we need to do is be on our guard, and trust our senses.

Meanwhile if the feckers who stole our copy of this book on the Dublin to Westport train yesterday afternoon please kill themselves? Yes, we weren’t on our guard at the time.

Related posts:

• Rapeseed oil: Ireland’s liquid gold

The newspapers both quote the editor of Le Guide de Routard, a French-language travel guide.

The guide’s editor, Pierre Josse, says: “I think many changed their travel plans immediately after the World Cup play-off and went elsewhere. But time is a healer.”

Which it is, of course. Ireland’s soccer fans are a decent lot, as other countries know if they’ve been “invaded” by our “green army” of supporters. Obviously we don’t hold a grudge against the entire French nation for what happened near the end of a wee footie match over two years ago.

The tourism story ends with the French travel guide man saying:

“I personally love Ireland and know the country very well, having travelled here so many times. But I found people, particularly in Dublin, pretty rude during the Celtic Tiger. They lost their spirit,” he told the Independent.

He even adds “vulgarity” in his Irish Times interview:

“But I found people, particularly in Dublin, pretty rude and vulgar during the Celtic Tiger. They lost their spirit.”

French tourism statistics

Let’s look at the figures. According to the Central Statistics Office, around 391,000 French tourists came to Ireland in 2009, and that fell to 342,000 the following year. Due to a soccer match? Or the recession? Or Ireland overpricing itself?

While the French are a big market for Irish tourism, the Irish tourism industry didn’t do itself  any favours during the boom. Eventually one in two French people coming to Ireland were saying that Irish holidays were “poor” or “very poor” value for money, according to the tourism industry’s own figures.

Graph: more and more French were saying that Irish holidays were rotten value for money

From of the cost of transport, to the price of eating out or a hotel bed, the tourism industry was  to the fore of “rip-off Ireland” over the past decade.

There was also a huge change in tourism habits. In 1997 the amount of tourists coming from France to Ireland was split almost 50-50 between air and sea (53% by air, and 47% by sea). Since then there has been the rise of low-cost airlines – now 86% of French tourists come by air.

Graph: fewer French tourists stay that long in Ireland

Cheap flights also meant  shorter breaks. Between 1997-2008, the proportion of French tourists staying 1-3 nights in Ireland increased from 4% to 18%.

In 1997, one in two French tourists (49%) stayed in bed-and-breakfasts and guesthouses, followed by the camping and caravan brigade. Hotels (16%) and hostels (12%) were way down the table.

The pecking order has changed enormously since then – in 2008 the hotels had more than doubled their share, and the caravans and campers had shrunk to just 5%.

Also bear in mind the huge increase in the number of new hotel/hostel beds in all that time, all part of the Celtic Tiger building frenzy. Maybe people prefer their creature comforts nowadays – though the rise in hostels suggests there’s a younger backpacker type market too. Either way, they want value for money.

Them figures go up to 2008. Since then the Irish tourism industry has had to slash its prices and get real. But let’s go back to that man from the French travel guide…

Should the Irish fear the French?

The Celtic Tiger was indeed a decade of “rude vulgarity”. If anything, we shouldn’t worry about whether French tourists fear the Irish, but whether the Irish abroad should fear the French (and numerous other nations).

Let’s get personal. Before the height of the Tiger, the two of us would be proud of being Irish while in France.

We’d book a table in a restaurant in town, and the waiter would ask for a name. “Oh, nous sommes les Irlandais,” we’d joke, and they’d smile and everything was grand.

In the village bar, our extended families would shout for the Irish against the French in rugby matches, and the banter with the neighbours would always be friendly (and very funny) and sometimes you’d even get a consolation free drink from le patron if we lost.

It certainly wasn’t like the dark days of the 1970s and 1980s over in England, when the Irish accent blew your cover as a potential terrorist.

In France we were les Irlandais, great crack altogether, and vive la république (without specifying which particular république) and all that.

In the past decade things did start to change. Across Europe  the Irish seemed to come across as or be portrayed as the brash nouveau riche, the property investors and penny-pinching airlines and sharp operators. All very sad really. For other people, too, such as some Polish construction workers, the Irish came to be known as nasty site foremen and sharp landlords.

Then the bubble burst, as bubbles always do, and the Irish became the sinners and debtors of Europe who are bringing down the euro and the entire fabric of civilisation. You can’t win.

But these are just generalisations and stereotypes of course. Underneath it all, the real French people we meet really don’t hate the Irish, and the Irish don’t hate the French either. Not really. Apart from Thierry Henry of course*.

(*Unless you count the significant Irish contingent of Arsenal fans now that he’s back with the Gunners this week)

The national total grew by 7% in a decade, to more than 64 million people on 1 January 2009. The Languedoc-Roussillon  jumped more than 14% to 2.6 million people.

Within this, the Hérault was up by 135,500 people, going along with earlier predictions about major growth in the département. The next fastest growing region was the Midi-Pyrénées, up 12%.

Here are some of the big national facts and trends from the new INSEE figures:

• Much of the country’s population is still highly concentrated in the big cities – one in four people live in the 200 largest villes, and almost half of the population live in communes of over 10,000 people
• But the fastest growing category during the decade was the communes with 1,000 to 9,999 people – they grew 9% in the period. They may be only a third of the French population but they accounted for almost half of all population growth
• France has 36,680 communes
• Many communes are still really tiny – nearly a third (12,101) have fewer than 250 inhabitants, and make up just 3% of the total population
• One in two communes have fewer than 426 inhabitants

Check out INSEE’s website for more statistics including:

• A detailed analysis of population trends in Languedoc-Roussillon up to 2006
• The 2009 figures for each arrondissement, canton and commune in the Hérault

If the holiday falls on a Sunday it’s celebrated on the following Monday (apart from Easter Sunday and Whit Sunday, which always fall on a Sunday). No time off in lieu is granted when a public holiday falls on a Saturday, such as the Fête Nationale in July 2012.

As usual, May is the month in which the holidays pile one on top of the other, with at least three clear opportunities to stretch them out or “faire le pont”.

2012 also happens to be une année bisextile - a leap year

Sunday, 1 January
Jour de l’An (New Year’s Day)

Monday, 2 January
New Year’s Day in lieu

Monday, 9 April
Lundi de Pâques (Easter Monday)

Tuesday, 1 May
Fête du travail (Labour Day)

Tuesday, 8 May
Fête de la Victoire (Victory in Europe Day)

Thursday, 17 May
Ascension (Ascension Day)

Monday, 28 May
Pentecôte (Pentecost)

Saturday, 14 July
Fête Nationale de la France (Bastille Day)

Wednesday, 15 August
Assomption (Assumption of Mary)

Thursday, 1 November
Toussaint (All Saints)

Sunday, 11 November
Armistice 1918 (Armistice Day)

Monday, 12 November
Armistice Day in lieu

Tuesday, 25 December
Noël (Christmas)