Mr. Niall Gibbons:

I will start at the top and give some detail on the figures. When the referendum was held last year and the result turned out the way it did, we went immediately into action mode. We visited the UK to interview some key players in the marketplace there. We asked Red C to carry out a survey on consumer sentiment, which is critical in our business. Economic sentiment has a huge impact on people's intention to travel. Some of the figures I referred to were similar. We did the Red C survey twice. We did it in July and then again in January and there was little change in sentiment. Essentially, what it reflected is that people feel they are going to be poorer and that then they are going to spend less on their holidays.

We also wanted to watch how the British market would perform. To date what we have seen is that the British take approximately 65 million trips abroad every year in total. That is the size of the market. Oxford Economics, which advise us, initially reckoned that they would take 1.5 million trips less - a 2% reduction. We are now looking at travel into Ireland this year being down by perhaps 4%. The forecasts are starting to get worse rather than better. We only got the information in from the Office for National Statistics in the UK last week. This showed that the number of British people travelling into mainland Europe has slightly increased, which is interesting. We do not have all the information or the answer as to why. However, competitiveness is a key issue for us at the moment. It is there in the eurozone. However, we know, for example, from looking at booking engines such as Booking.comthat Ireland's hotel prices are among the most expensive in Europe at the moment. We just took Dublin by way of example and benchmarked it against Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London and Paris. We were ahead of London and Paris. Only Amsterdam was more expensive. That was across a range of dates as we headed into the summer season. We have seen, according to STR data, average room rates in hotels increase by 8% again during 2017. We need to be mindful of this because we cannot expect to walk into 2017 increasing prices on last year when we have already had approximately 10% to 15% depreciation on currency. Competitiveness is absolutely and utterly key.

On the regional question, we are also at a point where at peak times of the year we have capacity constraints within our industry, both in terms of hotel accommodation and visitor attractions. It is vital that we start to work to develop season extension and our regional proposition. We have worked closely with our colleagues in Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Northern Ireland on products such as the Wild Atlantic Way and how it gets projected into the marketplace. The advice that I would give to community groups is to work with the people on the ground in Fáilte Ireland. We need to see and find out if there are ways we can bring the stories of all these small places to life in the overseas marketplace. People are coming to Ireland to look for an experience that stands out and about which they can brag. There are many places off the beaten track that offer that. It is important that people offer these experiences longer into the season than they currently do. It is very hard when in a rural area. Sometimes the season only goes from perhaps May to September. In our most meeting with our colleagues in Fáilte Ireland, we were encouraged to see them try to work with clusters of the industry to push the opening of the season out longer. Unless there are things to do and restaurants and visitor attractions stay open a little longer, it will be very hard to deliver that season extension.

The Wild Atlantic Way has been a great success. It has been really well received overseas. I always keep reminding people that our clock goes back to zero on 1 January and that we have to do it all again. The in excess of 10 million people it is hoped will come in 2017 are not the people that came last year. When we speak of a spend of a 4.5% increase, it is really a 104.5% because all the people that come this year are not be coming back again. We have to keep on working with the industry on the ground. The northern part of the Wild Atlantic Way offers an awful lot of opportunity because there is a lot of congestion on the southern part of the Wild Atlantic Way. I know that our colleagues in Fáilte Ireland are looking at places such as Sliabh Liag in County Donegal and towns such as Sligo that offer additional capacity for us to sell into the international marketplace.

Is there a silver lining to Brexit? Last year 1.2 billion people took trips around the globe spending approximately $1.5 trillion. That is the size and scope of the global travel industry. Forecasts from the United Nations World Tourism Organization are that it will continue to grow by approximately 4% to 5% per year and that there will be approximately 1.8 billion people taking trips around the world by 2030.

Brexit will come and go, and I do not know how it will unfold, but people are still going to travel and we have to make sure that we have sufficient visibility in the international marketplace to grow our fair share of that. Everybody in the political and business world would like the common travel area to remain but our market diversification strategy, which we started on way before Brexit came into existence, has seen some amazing results. Our growth in places like France and Germany has been really spectacular. Spain is now our fifth largest tourism market and has seen business quadruple in the past 15 years, to the point were we have 400,000 people visiting Ireland every year. Italy has grown very strong. Operators from China are reporting very strong double digit growth on the back of the British-Irish visa scheme and some of the promotions that are on offer. The silver lining that will come out of it is our capacity to diversify and grow as much business as we can from other markets, but we must get the message out there that we are not giving up on Britain. It is still a really important market for us, but when one's budget is down by 35% one is in a position of having to make tough choices. We cannot be out there with the same level of visibility that we had five or six years ago. That is a big risk for us going forward.

The responsibility for capital infrastructure largely falls to our colleagues in Fáilte Ireland. They have spending proposals but I cannot elaborate on the detail of what those are. Some of the projects mentioned there are important. As our main tourism sites get busier and busier it is really important that we develop a second tier of visitor attractions, and Fáilte Ireland have submitted capital proposals to that effect. I do not have the details of those today, but I am very supportive of that.

We have made the point that we cannot continue to grow at this rate while our share of voice starts to shrink. It has been shrinking in the last number of years. Our visibility in all our key main markets has been falling at quite a rapid rate over the last number of years, and Ireland's ranking compared to competitor destinations has been falling as well. That is a concern for us. As part of the tourism action group established by Deputy Paschal Donohoe when he was Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport there was a commitment to restore the tourism marketing budget, although it was silent on the timescale. We saw our budget stabilise in 2017, although as a result of the collapse in the value of sterling versus the dollar we were left nursing a wound of over €1 million in exchange rate losses. We get a grant of £11 million from the Department of the Economy in Northern Ireland which more than covers our spend in sterling in the UK, but we have to then convert that to US dollars. We lost over €1 million last year on the currency exchange because of the collapse of sterling against the dollar. These things have had unintended consequences for us. We sought restoration of budget in discussions as part of the development of our corporate plan over a four year period. We have not been successful in that yet but we will keep hammering away at it. However, we have seen great successes and we are delighted with them. I thank the committee for the compliments. It was nice that the World Economic Forum gave us a good accolade as well. That is only sustainable for so long. We are in the business of generating economic growth here. We intend to generate spend this year in excess of €5.5 billion. The summer season still appears to be very positive, because the exceptionally strong growth that we have in North America, the very strong growth we have had in long haul markets and the modest growth in Europe is certainly painting over the mixed picture that we are seeing. That 8% fall in Britain is quite a worrying trend.