Shane Ross (Dublin Rathdown, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I would like to be able to do that but we cannot increase the budget in every area.

We have increased it by a small amount but we will be pushing to increase it more because this is a crisis area. There are so many issues involved, like maintaining the common travel area and looking for new markets. The latter is probably where we are going to have to try to meet our targets because we are not going to meet our UK targets. UK visitor numbers are going to go down and there is anecdotal evidence of that happening already. Tourism Ireland is already embarking on marketing campaigns in the United States of America, India, mainland Europe and elsewhere. The Deputy is right. We will need to keep the great success of tourism going by increasing our budgets. That is our aspiration. I do not want to put a figure on it because the committee will only come back to me and say that I did not get that amount or that the total is too small. We will be looking for increased funding, particularly for the overseas marketing budget, when the time comes.