IT WAS once a mainstay of Ireland’s tourism industry. But the number of overseas visitors coming to Ireland in search of their roots is in serious decline and has halved in the past five years alone.

Most visitors now have no blood link to the auld sod, according to research by Failte Ireland. Those with an Irish connection are increasingly finding their great-grandparents through the internet rather than travelling to Kerry or Galway in search of old gravestones or parish records.

In 1999, there were 107,000 genealogically motivated visitors to Ireland, but that was down to 40,000 last year. The percentage of holidaymakers from New England, the traditional American tourism market, was down from 17% in 1999 to 12% last year, while the proportion from the mid-Atlantic region was down from 27% to 18%.

Tourism chiefs say that post 9/11, a different sort of American and British tourist is coming, one with no Irish roots. “In 1999, only one-third of American visitors to Ireland had no ethnic link but last year that was almost half,” said a tourism official. “Six years ago, 54% of British visitors had no ethnic link and now that’s 67%.”

Genealogy tourists no longer need to come to Ireland, or visit its 35 genealogy centres, in order to find their roots. The Mormon church in Salt Lake City has posted an enormous searchable database of births and deaths on the net, while Ellis Island immigration records have also been computerised.

The Irish centres now get on average 500 visitors each a year, with only 250 callers, or five per week, to the centre in Fingal. They were established after a task force in the 1980s decided that there was good potential in “genealogy tourism”, luring more of the 70m people worldwide claiming Irish ancestry to the country. Most of the centres are not sustainable, and will close if Fas, the training and employment body, withdraws its funding.

The government has spent €2.5m since 1997 on the Irish Genealogical Project, a mission to computerise 28m church and census records. This was supposed to be 90% finished by 2007, but because of a lack of Fas trainees the work has slowed to a trickle and at current rates it will take more than 20 years to input the 3.2m church records outstanding. Irish Genealogy Ltd, which is in charge of the project, is now planning to hire a private company to input the data.

The Genealogical Society of Ireland has said tourists coming to Ireland get a bad service, having to pay €45 for a basic search, and facing long delays for online requests.

“People are drifting away from our over-priced information service to what is freely available,” said Michael Merrigan, secretary of the society. “These genealogy centres should be attached to the county libraries, and the information given free of charge. Visitors should get a free service instead of being ripped off.

“In that way they would be more likely to form a long-lasting identification with parts of the country. Family history should be used as a tool for people to create an affinity with the country, and give them a desire to visit.”

Eamon Rossi, chief executive of Irish Genealogy Ltd, said the database was being used as a hook to attract tourists to Ireland. “There is a lot of information available, so we try to sell the emotional experience of coming here and walking the land,” he said. “Genealogy is a motivator for people; it encourages them to differentiate between Ireland and, say, Scotland.”

Rossi said there were now 3m names on IGL’s searchable database, and there had been 250,000 searches so far. A further 3m records need to be indexed, and IGL was considering fast-tracking that by buying in data input.

“A consultant has estimated this will cost €3.5m but we think we can do it cheaper,” Rossi said. “We have invited centres to apply for funding for a pilot project.”

Post 9/11, there is an upward trend in American vistors, with 867,000 coming last year — still below the 2000 figure.

Officials have noticed that some of the American tourist market has been put off by uncertainty over terrorism, but it insists that Ireland is competing well for the “new” type of tourist. “Genealogy is a product that Failte Ireland continues to support,” said an official.

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