by Ronan Casey
Belvedere House, Gardens and Park, often referred to as “the jewel in Westmeath’s tourism crown”, is hemorrhaging visitor numbers at an alarming rate.
The lakeside estate, for years rated as the top visitor attraction in Westmeath, is now attracting less than HALF the amount of annual visitors it received just three years ago.
Figures obtained by Topic also reveal that in the space of just four years, the attraction has lost almost 100,000 visitors per year.
According to the latest figures, in 2014 a total of 67,096 visitors either paid admission, attended an event or held a season or other ticket to Belvedere, which costs the Westmeath taxpayer over €600,000 per year to run.
Between 2007 and 2011, the estate was attracting, on average, over 157,000 visitors per year.
These figures were verified by both Westmeath County Council, who own and now manage the estate, and Fáilte Ireland. Topic could not obtain the official figures for 2012 and 2013, but even without them, the 2014 figures demonstrate a dramatic fall in favour of the estate with both locals and tourists alike.
The estate’s crown is beginning to slip so badly that if visitor numbers drop below 50,000, it will breach NRA road signage rules and lose the prominent brown signage it currently enjoys on motorways and other important road links.
Visitors to Belvedere are grouped in three catagories: season ticket holders, event attendees and paid admission. Surprisingly, tourists to the facility account for the smallest number of visitors.
Taking 2010 as a sample, in the year after the economy took a turn, the amenity attracted 158,107 visitors.
The majority of visitors, 76,206 (or 48%), were repeat visits from season ticket holders, family memberships or free entries. 56,001 (or 35%) were associated with events, with over 36,000 of these attendees of the Midlands Home and Garden Show and the ‘Life’ festival alone. A further 25,900 (or 16%) were paid admission/free admission, i.e. day trippers, tourists, free independent traveller, groups and packages.
In the first half of the year alone, a total of 95,955 visitors came through the doors, significantly more than the whole of 2014
So far in 2015, 37,220 visitors have gone to Belvedere, so 2015 may end up on par with, if not above, 2014. Certainly not reaching the same heights as the years 2007 – 2011.
A large number of this year’s attendees will be concert goers at the now annual ‘Life’ music festival, which last year increased its capacity from 5,000 to 10,000 patrons. Attendees at events such as ‘Life’ and other festivals at Belvedere, as well as popular annual events such as the Easter egg hunt and Halloween trail, have always been included in the annual visitor figures.
The visitor figures are publicly available on Fáilte Ireland reports and other documentation as well as on the Council’s own website.
FINANCES
Belvedere House, Park and Gardens has been operating at a loss for some time, and according to the latest figures released by the County Council when they were adopting their budget for 2015 earlier this year, last year’s total expenditure was €631,288, with the estate bringing the tax- payer an income €317,810 – roughly half of what was spent.
The agreed 2015 expenditure was set at €571,098 with an additional capital provision of €25,000, and the County Manager/Chief Executive, Pat Gallagher and his Finance Director, Jimmy Dalton estimated the estate would bring in €307,400 this year.
OTHER ATTRACTIONS
Whilst the figures represent a serious slide, Belvedere is still the most popular tourism attractions, under local authority ownership and/or management, in the county.
According to figures obtained by Topic from the Chief Executives Orders for July, the most popular attraction in the county, paid for by the taxpayer, is the Athlone Regional Sports Centre, which last year had 210,793 visitors. In the first half of this year, it has attracted 115,123 visitors.
Mullingar Swimming Pool has so far this year attracted 32,727 people, already higher than in 2014.
Other tourism attractions in the county pale in comparison to Belvedere, such as Athlone Castle Visitor Centre, which attra-cted 22,533 visitors in 2014, and, in the first six months of this year, has attracted just over 9,000. The Luan Gallery on the banks of the Shannon had 13,309 visits last year and so far this year, 6,443 have viewed its art collections.
NATIONAL
According to Fáilte Ireland’s latest figures, Belvedere was ranked the 29th top tourist attraction in the country between 2007 – 2011. It was the third biggest in the midlands region, eclipsed only by the Bru Na Boinne Visitor Centre, County Meath, which attracted an average of 227,565 visitors, and Powerscourt House and Gardens in Wicklow, which attracted an average of just over 220,000 visitors per year.
Belvedere was closely followed in the Midlands and East region by Clonmacnoise in Offaly and the Irish National Stud and Japanese Gardens in Kildare, which all averaged around 150,000 visitors per year.
In any man’s language, a slip from these dizzy heights to 67,096 is a cause for concern. It would put Belvedere outside of the top 60 attractions in the state.
NRA policy on the provision of tourist and leisure signage on national roads (2011) states that a permanently established tourist or leisure destination that attracts or is used by a significant amount of visitors within 30km of a national road, must attract a minimum of 50,000 visitors per annum to be allowed erect signage on dual carriageways and motorways. This is a luxury Belvedere may lose if visitors continue to slide from the jewel in the crown of Westmeath tourism.
