James Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests. I do not know if they were listening to our previous exchanges with the Small Firms Association, IBEC and the food industry representatives. They came with many suggestions on how to reduce red tape, which we would welcome. We also welcome the input of the Irish Hotels Federation. I hope that we may have an opportunity to collate all of the suggestions together at a later meeting relating to this subject to see what would make sense and what might not. With regard to helping to keep costs down we would at least have the benefit of the suggestions being from those who are at the coalface.

I believe that everybody would agree with Mr. Fenn's points about insurance costs, legal costs and the constant vigilance required in that area. Much work has been done on that to date but the work needs to continue, by this and by other committees that have led on the issue.

In dealing with local authority rates, I will ask Mr. Fenn the same question that I posed to other witnesses. If we are not to base it on rent then what might we base it on? I believe that a lot of people in business are very exercised by rates and the sense of a lack of transparency around how the figures are arrived at. Anyone in this room who is in business would understand and know that if a person appeals their rates bill, in many instances they receive a reduction. This is because they have employed someone to do it who knows how to make the argument. This, however, costs another couple of thousand euro. There is no question that these issues need to be addressed.

I wish to speak about one specific issue that relates to the hotel industry. It relates to a very great unhappiness that I have personally, and that many people have politically, with the situation of price gouging. That is not too strong a term for it. It occurs every time there is a major event in the capital city. Costs go through the roof when people are trying to get a hotel room. People in the industry have argued that it is down to insurance, which it clearly is not. Why is it a different price the rest of the time? All of us in this room understand tourism. All of us understand that there is a high season, a mid season and a low season but what occurs around these particular events is nothing short of outrageous. It does the industry tremendous damage. It does this in two ways; people have to pay the money the first time they come and then they think twice about coming back. In the Irish Hotels Federation presentation we heard how we all must do our utmost to ensure that we continue to attract visitors from abroad, but scalping people when they arrive here is not a way to do it. With modern social media now and all sorts of sites that rate people's experiences it gets out very quickly and can have a very negative effect.

I have previously spoken on the idea that there is a large cohort of very healthy and relatively wealthy individuals between the ages of 65 and 80 who are looking for things to do and places to go. This is a market that Ireland is ideally set for with our climate, wonderful sights, food, entertainment and the safety we can bring to a visitor's experience of visiting Ireland. If visitors get scalped when they get to Dublin it will have a very negative effect, and I believe it is having a negative effect. The other people who get particularly cheesed off with this, and who are dissuaded from coming back to Ireland and from doing business here, are regular business people. When there is a big event on they find that they cannot get a hotel at a reasonable rate. They continually complain to me and my colleagues about it. They ask how come it is a different price on a particular weekend to the price on every other weekend they arrived in the city. The Dublin hotels who are Irish Hotels Federation members who engage in this practice are in danger of killing the goose that lays the golden egg. I do not mind saying this to the federation representatives here today that, such is the concern, excluding hotels from the 9% VAT rate was being considered, letting it apply to the remainder of the hospitality sector but not hotels. This practice is exercising people and the Irish Hotels Federation members would do well to listen.