Frank Feighan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will try to be brief. Most of the questions have been asked by other speakers. I congratulate the witnesses. It is not too often that people come into these committee rooms with a good story to tell. The industry came from a difficult situation where it faced huge challenges five or six years ago with the downturn in the economy. The 9% VAT rate has certainly been a help, but most of the witnesses are self-employed and have gone out there to put huge funding into their own businesses. It is a very good news story but we cannot be complacent. That is why we are here today with Fáilte Ireland and the other witnesses to work together to build a brand and add more value.

There are two or three different issues on which I want to ask questions. Nobody has talked about Airbnb. People are saying that it is taking over and has affected the homeless. It has taken a lot of apartments out of the system, but I am certain that if it was not available - in Dublin especially - we would have lost a lot of the tourists coming in. It is building up that capacity which is vitally needed. It is an issue on which I ask the witnesses to comment.

The Office of Public Works, OPW, has huge swathes of property around the country. It is a typical public body in that it sometimes fails to think outside the box. I see it in my own town where €6 million or €7 million has been put into the abbey yet the OPW closed the bloody thing down three or four weeks ago without telling anyone on the ground. These are things that should not happen. I remember a few years ago trying to get permission to take photographs for weddings. Are the witnesses getting co-operation from these State-owned facilities and from State employees? If they are not, I would like to put it out from the committee that they should do a lot more. While a lot has changed, they sometimes lack the capacity to think outside the box the way the industry has done.

I see it myself that it is a problem to get the tourists out of Dublin and down the country. It is the same to Belfast and is a problem all over the world. If they go to London, it is hard to get them out to the regions. Mr. Joe Dolan is here from Carrick-on-Shannon. What has happened there has been incredible. It is a small town of 4,000 people which is boxing way above its weight. There is capacity in apartments and hotels; the whole lot. It is a brand and is our regional town. I was chair of Lough Key Forest Park Action Group before I came into politics many years ago. We received co-operation from the local authority and Coillte because the latter was not allowed to drawn down from the European Regional Development Fund. It was my idea to bring the local authority on board and it was a joint approach. We got control of the park and set up a company called Moylurg Rockingham Limited. It has been very successful with 50 or 60 people employed and the local authority earned €200,000 from it last year. Are there other projects like that? This was seen in south Longford with Centre Parcs is coming on board. Are there more projects we can do, where semi-States do not have the expertise or cannot draw down the funding or think outside the box? Can we look at those again with local authorities?

I live in a town beside Lough Key Forest Park. We had two hotels but now have no hotel. We missed the building of the hotels where there were property speculators building houses and hotels. Most of them did not make money and the banks have taken them over and sold them off cheaply. It has probably been a huge problem for hoteliers because it is a non-level playing field where NAMA or the banks are paying for these hotels. We are in a town now with no hotel. It is the same in Ballaghaderreen, Castlerea and other small towns. If we want to get tourists into those areas, we will need hotels. However, nobody will build a hotel now because one can buy one ten miles up the road. Is there anything the Government could do by way of a tax incentive or a block grant? There could be only 15 or 20 of these towns in the country but if they do not get a flagship hotel, they will not survive. Do Mr. Gibbons or Mr. Dolan have any ideas as to what they would do to address that if they were in government?