I took a peek at post-Celtic Tiger Ireland last week and it wasn't pretty. I was in Ballina, where the fly-fishing season is beginning amid gloomy predictions for the economy.

Everyone is praying for a long dry summer; hardly surprising after last year's wash-out. Ballina draws rich northern European anglers for one very special reason: the Ridge Pool.

This 300-yard reach of the River Moy is tourism gold for the west. During the summer months, when its level drops, every tide brings a shoal of bright bars of Atlantic silver racing up the estuary into the Ridge Pool. In the best years the salmon are packed together, jostling for space in the seething, shallow waters. No wonder they call it the Silver Furlong.

Perhaps it wasn't noticed because of the announcement by Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach, that he was retiring, but the Ridgepool Hotel, overlooking the prized stretch of river, was going out of business too. While Bertie insisted that his resignation had nothing to do with the ever- louder questions about his finances, the Ridgepool's demise seemed more enigmatic.

I couldn't get a room with a river view because it was full. In fact it is booked solid until the end of September. Yet with unseeming haste it was being sold off and the staff served their notices. Then it emerged that the new owner was a company that runs “direct provision” hostels for asylum-seekers on behalf of the Government. The town's business owners went ballistic, belly-aching at the machinations of civil servants, far away in Dublin and gamely struggling with the novelty of Ireland having an immigration problem.

It can still seem dizzying how quickly the Celtic Tiger has transformed the country. A nation that for centuries was a net exporter of its people suddenly has full employment.

Ask what it is that sells Ireland to tourists and the answer will include something about the friendliness of the locals. Driving westwards from Dublin to the Atlantic, it's no exaggeration to say that your chances of meeting anyone Irish are slim. In the petrol stations, cafés, bars and shops you will find Poles, Lithuanians and Brazilians giving you the cead mile failte. But no Irish. They are almost all in higher-paid skilled work. Which is great news if you're Irish, but not so wonderful for visitors in search of the elusive craic.

I suppose there is an evolutionary logic (albeit at breakneck pace) to a hotel becoming home to the less fortunate neighbours of the foreigners who in the past decade have done the jobs that the Irish themselves no longer want or need. Even so, the people of Ballina didn't agree: the prospect of immigrants' washing lines flapping in the faces of anglers was too much.

A mole in the justice ministry got the word out to the Ballina burghers just in time for them to thwart the Dublin suits. But the hotel remains closed, its bookings transferred en bloc to a charmless modern barn of a place miles from the river.

Which means that, so long as the weather is kind in the coming months, Ballina will reap its golden salmon harvest unhindered, but bridling over unfounded charges that its reaction to the asylum-seekers' hostel was motivated by racism.

Not hatred of foreigners then, but fears about the impact on a tourism industry that is turning fragile - a tale that may seem as strange to visitors as the mystery of where all the Irish have gone.

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