Coach Fellas: Heritage and Tourism in Ireland

by Kelli Ann Costa

Overview

The Coach Fellas are known to almost all tourists who traverse the Irish countryside. Ostensibly bus drivers, they are also the tour guides who provide the crucial component in the branding of “people, place, and pace” upon which Irish heritage tourism depends. Kelli Costa’s ethnography of these highly trained and informed working class men highlights a previously ignored component of the tourism industry. She also demonstrates their importance in providing a visitor-specific vision of heritage that contrasts with the realities of contemporary economic development.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781598744064
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/15/2009
Series:	Heritage, Tourism, and Community , #2
Pages:	255
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Kelli Ann (Costa) níc Maoileoin spent many years in the horse business before turning her attention to anthropology in the 1980s. She received her Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she studied archaeology, heritage, and tourism under John W. Cole, Oriol Pi-Sunyer, H. Martin Wobst, Dena Dincauze, and Robert Paynter. Kelli was a professor at Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire for ten years before taking a Fulbright Fellowship at the Dublin Institute of Technology in 2006. The Coach Fellas came about after her friend Lesley Daunt, an Irish coach driver-guide, suggested she study the industry in 2005. Now residing in Ireland, Kelli remains associated with the Dublin Institute of Technology and involved in the Irish tourism industry. She conducts accredited college tours of Ireland’s archaeological heritage sites, is busy with research, and lives in the Midlands surrounded by the people and places she loves.

Table of Contents

Preface Chapter 1: Tourism: A Consideration of the Literature Chapter 2: Heritage Tourism and Discourse in Ireland Chapter 3: Heritage and Archaeology in Ireland Chapter 4: Representing Ireland’s Heritage Chapter 5: Participants in Irish Tourism Chapter 6: Tourists in Ireland Chapter 8: Components of Irish Coach Tourism Chapter 9: Conclusion