Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We have made additional funding available to support longer advertising campaigns through Tourism Ireland. We are trying to get additional vacations and holidays into Ireland at points of the year when we have the capacity to facilitate them. I will explain how it is working at the moment. I suppose we are in the off-season, or the off-shoulder period, now. We will have to see how it is going to perform. It is clear that the investment we have made in tourism to date is yielding extraordinary results. If I recall correctly, the visitor figures that were released yesterday show that there has been an increase of between 13% and 15% in the number of visitors to Ireland so far this year. I have every reason to believe we will finish this year with a double-digit increase in the number of people coming to Ireland. When we deliver that figure, I expect that we will see an increase of between 5% and 10% for the off-shoulder period compared with a year ago.