STEPPING BACK IN TIME: Summer holiday show bids to beat winter blues

Two thirds of the show was taken up with camping gear, trailer tents, motorhomes, caravans, boats, sailboards and “even a sit down and have fun water-ski outfit”.

The News Letter noted: “What was left seemed to the News Letter, to be divided between the Sports Council/Toyota Forest Walk, wherein one got immediately disorientated and a host of travel companies, mainly offering . . . camping holidays abroad.”

Even the shipping companies like Townsend Thorensen, Sealink, Irish Continental and B and I were plugging the camping concepts as well as other various tours.

Vying with the Continental travel proponents, Ulster held its own corner with a gaggle of stands: Craigavon, Carrickfergus, Larne, Moyle, Fermanagh, Newry and Mourne, Armagh, Bangor, The Sperrins, Londonderry, Magherafelt, Omagh, Strabane and Belfast.

The Isle of Man along with the Welsh Tourist Board and Cunninghame, a southern Scots grouping, battled to claim the to spot in the home Sunshine League.

The News Letter noted: “The campaign for Ulster’s holiday budgets wasn’t confined to the enticing sunshine offer from Sun Med, Sunny Spain and La France, all of whom seemed most anxious to entice holidaymakers to their shores . . . the Northern Ireland Tourist was out to keep the cash at home while Eire’s Bord Failte seemed equally anxious to have as much of it spent across the border as possible.”

Indeed, if my mind serves me correctly, the Armitage summer holiday in the summer of 1982 was spent across the borders in the Republic, firstly tracing the path my grandfather would have travelled when he emigrated to Northern Ireland from Nenagh in Co Tipperary, before we travelled on to the Ring of Kerry and a stop of Daniel O’Connell’s house at Derrynane and then around to kiss the Blarney Stone in Co Cork. One of my lasting memories is my late father taking my elder sister and I trout fishing near Roundwood in Co Wicklow.

The News Letter’s correspondent at the Holiday and Leisure Show commented: “With a pint costing nearly £1 in Eire, the efforts of the Belfast and Ulster Licensed Vintners Association to get signatures on a petition favouring Sunday public house opening seemed more than reasonable.”

Exhibition organiser Grath Corbett was sanguine about the smaller than the previous year’s show.

“It is a recession but people are still doing things, even more than usual with so much time on their hands – and lots of people are still managing to take holidays.

“This is a chance to find out what there is under one roof, something for everyone to do, and that’s what it’s all about . . . like everything also in a recession, it is a hard sell but there 
is a lot of value to be had,” he said.