While it may have felt like anything but, 2023 was, in theory, a return to normality.
While the scenes of global conflict that unraveled before our eyes over the past year, and devastating environmental disasters such as the Turkey-Syria earthquake, made the world seem cruelly unpredictable, the past twelve months also brought some stability back to our lives in other ways.
Notably, 2023 brought with it no more lockdowns, and was the year where we truly got to grips with this new frontier known as ‘post-pandemic life’.
“2023 was the first full calendar year that we could officially say we were post-pandemic, in that all restrictions had been lifted,” explains Eoghan O’Mara Walsh, CEO of the Irish tourism Industry Confederation (ITIC). “Obviously that meant we were still in recovery mode throughout 2023, and still are, but last year managed to show us just how robust and resilient the industry is, and that tourism is certainly on the right recovery path.”
