Ms Monica MacLaverty:

The Gathering Ireland 2013 has been a major focus for Tourism Ireland over the past 18 months. Tourism Ireland has responsibility for the overseas marketing of this initiative. Our objectives are threefold in order to meet our target of 325,000 incremental visitors and €180 million in incremental revenue.

The first objective is to develop a meaningful engagement with the Irish diaspora overseas while encouraging it to organise their gatherings in Ireland. This translated into Tourism Ireland's overseas partnership programme where we reached out to diaspora networks, Irish associations, embassies and Irish federations. To date, this has resulted in over 500 Gatherings which have been pledged and which will bring in approximately 20,000 incremental visitors. The next objective is to reach out to the tens of millions in the Irish diaspora overseas with a specific invitation to invite them home in 2013. Working closely with The Gathering Ireland, Tourism Ireland has promoted those Gatherings in Ireland with the greatest potential to attract incremental overseas visitors. This has resulted in over 85 Facebook campaigns in the year to date micro-targeting specific passion points from Harley Davidsons and GAA to comedy festivals and literature. To date, we have created an overseas database for these festivals and Gatherings of 170,00 overseas people who are interested in these festivals. This is a database that they can target next year and in years to come. The final objective is to create a sense of urgency for all potential visitors to come and visit Ireland in 2013.

To ensure we deliver on all of these objectives and achieve the growth we set out, it was imperative to work closely with the associations and networks available to us. The Institute of Directors in Great Britain provides access to 30,000 Irish people who sit on the boards of British companies. The Federation of Irish Societies, the Lansdowne Club, chambers of commerce, the Ireland Funds and Irish embassies are just a few examples of invaluable networks we continue to work with throughout the year.

From a business tourism perspective, Tourism Ireland has achieved a number of successes including the Spar International conference, which took place in Dublin and Killarney bringing 280 incremental overseas visitors, which brought in an incremental revenue of €820,000. Alltech, with its impressive 3,000 delegates, will be worth over €3 million to the Irish economy and Fujitsu, with 300 delegates, was won in Great Britain by working with an Irish enabler, Mary McNally. The Aer Lingus-Etihad hurling Gathering taking place in Galway is another great example of a new event that was created this year to target the overseas diaspora. The Manchester Irish Festival will bring 1,000 incremental visitors to Mayo in August.

Tourism Ireland worked very closely with our airline partners and Dublin Airport Authority in the early days as we recognised the importance of having the access in place to support the impending increase in demand. We used The Gathering as an additional hook to ensure that Ireland stood out among fierce international competition and developed business cases to support airlines investing in incremental capacity to Ireland for 2013. The result has been rewarding and we are delighted to see an increase in capacity from North America of 27%. This translates into 4,000 additional seats from North America to Ireland per week during the peak season. The Gathering has certainly contributed to this success.

The four core Gathering markets are the US, Great Britain, Canada and Australia. Early indications are that our efforts are succeeding and forward bookings from tour operators and airline carriers look very positive. In non-core markets such as France and Germany, our message is that The Gathering is an invitation to the world to celebrate the best of Irish food, history, culture, sports, fun and lots more.