Her new position at the meeting point between the North and the Republic’s tourism interests has squared the circle. “Now I think we fully appreciate it,” she says. “Of any job that I have had, [my father] was particularly thrilled when I applied for and got the role at Tourism Ireland.”

After the departure of her predecessor, Niall Gibbons, to Saudi Arabia, Mansergh was hired in September to turn around an industry still fumbling for direction in the pandemic’s shadow.

Ireland’s domestic tourism sector has long argued that visitor numbers have been inflated by high volumes of returning outbound travel among Irish residents. After a revamp this year by the Central Statistics Office, the latest figures make for a sobering read.

In August this year inbound tourism was down about 40 per cent compared with the same period in 2019 (from 1.2 million to 700,000 visitors). Persistent high inflation and a return to 13.5 per cent VAT for the hospitality sector — up from the reduced 9 per cent rate throughout the pandemic — have only increased the pressure.

Strange, then, that there have been rumblings that the recent budget reduced Tourism Ireland’s funding for the coming year — one insider suggested it was down by as much as €10 million from last year’s €78 million, though Mansergh says it has remained “stable”.

It is a challenging backdrop that has the makings of a story of redemption or slow decline. Mansergh is well placed to write the former.

After graduating from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in English and Irish literature — including a summer as a tour guide at the Vatican, “living off tips” — the Dubliner took a year out to do as all literature graduates do: write a novel.

“I spent the year travelling around Ireland to write it and now that I am older, I’m really grateful that I had that time to explore,” she says, albeit with a swift footnote. “But I’m also really grateful that it was never published …”

What followed was a shift into marketing and the start of a near 20-year career at what was then a start-up called Google. “It was less glamorous than you might imagine,” she says. “The thing about being in an early stage company is that everyone’s still learning — that’s the exciting bit. On the other hand, nothing works, which is the less exciting bit.”

When Mansergh joined in 2004, the Dublin office was still a rented space with a fledgling group of 50 employees. Today Google’s “campus” in Dublin 4 — said to have been assembled in a series of deals worth €300 million — is the headquarters for an Irish workforce that numbers more than 9,000.

Mansergh was on the front line of the transformation. From the early days of manually checking thousands of text advertisements for “dodgy adult content” to heading up Google Ads’ UK operations — including a six-month stint setting up an office in Hyderabad, India — and then leading the marketing of the internet browser Google Chrome in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In her final post, she led a team of 300 as managing director of UK and Ireland customer solutions.

“I was probably most proud of marketing Google Chrome,” she says. “When it launched it had less than 5 per cent market share. Even the tech industry said, ‘You’ll never get consumers to care about what a browser is’. And we took it to being the most used browser in the world.”

It is a success she hopes to replicate at Tourism Ireland. The crux of her plan is to pursue “value over volume” with a renewed focus on high-end travellers from North America, the UK and mainland Europe.

“Visitors from the US — our highest revenue market — tend to stay longer than other visitors, around eight nights,” she explains. “In 2019 we had 1.7 million visitors from the US spending €1.6 billion while they were here.”

Factored into this decision is a growing emphasis on sustainability and a “revenue per carbon footprint calculation” that ranks countries’ visitors according to their economic value and environmental cost. The inevitable conclusion has been that the benefits from far-flung markets — Asia, the Middle East and New Zealand — no longer justify the higher carbon footprint.

Outside the luxury end of the market, Mansergh faces the growing challenge of dwindling accommodation capacity.

At present about 13 per cent of hotel accommodation is no longer used for tourism thanks to a shortfall in housing for refugees. Tougher regulation on short-term lets in cities, such as those offered through Airbnb, has similarly squeezed supply.

“That’s not something to complain about or resent because it’s for societal reasons that long-term housing is needed,” Mansergh says. “But it does mean there’s a different reality for tourism in terms of the amount of accommodation that’s available.”

The solution is a shift in marketing towards the shoulder seasons. “Hotel occupancy is 88 per cent during summer months, but only 73 per cent from October to May,” Mansergh says. “[Closing] that 15 percentage point difference in occupancy could be worth hundreds of millions to the island of Ireland.”

Leveraging heritage is central to the vision. One plan involves rebranding a now Americanised Halloween under the ancient Celtic tradition from which it originates. A ghoulish St Patrick’s Day seems like a hard ask, but it is the kind of story that sells.

This year the “Fill your heart with Ireland” advertising campaign, featuring a string of all-Irish talent including the Derry Girls, garnered a billion views. Marketing across traditional media by co-funding television shows has also remained successful, Mansergh says, pointing to a collaboration with Channel 4 on Julia Bradbury’s Irish Journey, which reached a target audience of two million.

However, the need to stay on trend and “Instagram-accessible” is marked, and it is why the former Googler is now running Ireland’s tourism promotion body. If potential visitors are sold a certain aesthetic, they expect to see it in person.

“There’s an interesting paradox in that people say experience is the new social cachet over belongings, that people want authentic memories and stories to tell. However, people also really care about visuals,” Mansergh says. “Of our visitors coming in, 70 per cent plan to share pictures on social media, and that rises to 85 per cent in the under-45s.”

In the coming years, Mansergh eyes an opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence to give people “personalised itineraries” and an image of Ireland that matches the one they are looking for.

But is that the kind of visitor Ireland wants to be attracting?

Since the pandemic, communities have started to push back against “quick-fix” tourists arriving by the busload. Amsterdam banned cruise ships from its port, Venice will start charging visitors to enter the city beginning next year, and a small town in Vermont that found fame as the perfect spot for autumn photos is trying to outlaw tourists.

Mansergh is confident this won’t be the case in Ireland. “We know how much tourism brings to our communities and we are known for our warm welcome for a reason,” she says. “But that’s not to say there isn’t a risk of over-tourism as well.”

With global demand for travel still growing, for now the most pressing issues for Tourism Ireland are domestic.

Debate around the cap on passenger numbers at Dublin airport has thrown a stark light on the competing interests of airlines, the tourism industry and those advocating for a more sustainable approach to travel. Mansergh’s model of “value over volume” would suggest a levelling-off of visitors, but domestic businesses want higher footfalls.

“Talking to industry on the ground, I think we’re still in recovery mode post-Covid,” she says. “There is plenty of space for both recovery and growth beyond that before we get to a place of over-tourism.”

Mansergh is also being asked to lead an all-Ireland marketing strategy while Stormont remains at a stalemate. With no politicians at their desks, appointments to the various bodies that make up Tourism Ireland’s Northern Irish operations have stalled. Policy surrounding the Electronic Travel Authorisation — a £10 pass required if tourists want to enter Northern Ireland — is still up in the air despite the looming deadline for its rollout next year.

Mansergh admits there are difficulties to the political impasse, but says the civil servants have plugged the gaps in the interim. Her focus now is on delivering on both sides of the border. “That’s a very proud and meaningful remit to me,” she says. The legacy of the Good Friday agreement is in the hands of a new generation.

The life of Alice Mansergh

Age: 43
Lives: Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.
Family: Married, with two sons aged nine and five.
Education: Studied English and Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin.
Favourite film: The Quiet Girl
Favourite book: Normal People by Sally Rooney
Working day: I like to head into the office most days, where my time is split between sitting with the team and working out strategy for our campaigns. If I’m not in our Dublin or Coleraine headquarters, I’ll usually be out and about with leaders from the tourism industry hearing about their experiences and needs.
Downtime: I’ve holidayed every year of my life on the island of Ireland but when I’m not on the move I’m out spending time with my family and our golden retriever, Sandy. Otherwise it’s walking, swimming in the summer, gardening and cooking.