DUBLIN (Reuters) - After Barack Obama put it on the map by downing a gulp of Guinness, residents of the U.S. president's tiny ancestral home of Moneygall have spent the past week greeting busloads of tourists. "It's still all happening. We're still buzzing," said Moneygall resident Marian Healy, whose son Henry welcomed his distant cousin Barack to the sleepy village during the president's day trip to Ireland last week. "There was a busload of Japanese tourists this morning and there were Americans here earlier too, looking for Henry to have his photograph taken with them." Restaurateurs, hoteliers and tour operators countrywide are now hoping for a "Moneygall effect" of their own. Obama's morale-boosting stop-off, together with Queen Elizabeth's historic state visit just days earlier, have given Irish tourism a boost it desperately needed after three years of recession saw revenues and visitors drop by about a third. After a record 1,200 foreign journalists arrived for the first visit of a British monarch since independence from London in 1921, global headlines took a rare positive turn -- a break from the relentless run of bad economic news that culminated in Ireland's IMF/EU bailout late last year. WEB INTEREST The renewed interest in a country famed for its beautiful coastlines and rich literary history seems to be working. Internet searches by potential visitors from Ireland's two main overseas markets surged by almost 200 percent for some tourist spots included on the royal itinerary, according to Hotels.com, a leading provider of worldwide hotel accommodation. The website said searches last week by UK tourists for the county of Tipperary, where the Queen visited the Rock of Cashel, a medieval national movement that attracts thousands of tourists each year, nearly trebled compared to a year ago. Searches by U.S. tourists for Cork -- the last stop of the Queen's four-day trip -- doubled. Interest also jumped at home, with 225 percent more Irish tourists thinking of visiting Kildare, where the Queen spent an afternoon in the heartland of Irish horse-racing. With state-funded Tourism Ireland increasing its advertising spend this month by 35 percent compared to a year ago, officials say they are prepared to capitalise on the publicity. "If we were riding along normally, I'd say it's lovely to have the queen here and you're always delighted to have the President of the United States, but it would have a marginal impact on tourism," Eamon McKeon, chief executive of the Irish Tourist Industry Confederation (ITIC), told Reuters. "But I think coming as it did at the tail end of six months when the news has just been awful every day, it's far more important. It's up to us to stretch the publicity out for months and milk the goodwill for all it's worth."
