Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

My amendment No. 63 is similar but more specific. My party does not argue for the 9% rate to revert to the 13.5% rate across the board, although there are quite legitimate arguments to do so in certain sectors. I can see the rationale, for example, for newspapers, to continue to enjoy a 9% VAT rate but I presume there is a reason that they are grouped together and that is why it has to happen.

What we have looked at is the cost of the hotel beds sector. This particular part makes up approximately 40% of the revenue lost, given that vacancy rates have increased, that we have high costs in terms of hotel accommodation, and that hotel accommodation here is among the dearest in Europe and enjoys the highest occupancy rates in Europe. We are conscious that this is not the case across the board. I come from west Donegal. The hotels in that area enjoy a short window of reasonable occupancy of between six and eight weeks. The rest of the time is really challenging for them. That said, the majority of the hotel beds are in Dublin where occupancy rates are the highest in Europe and prices have increased 6% in the past year. There is no need to subsidise that sector anymore.

We need to find ways to support other sectors in areas which are struggling, such as hotels in more rural, isolated areas. The Wild Atlantic Way is one way of doing that but there is a need for other interventions.

We need to learn the lesson, when we introduce a VAT relief or tax relief that works, to have the courage to start to taper it off. This, in my view, is the cycle of tapering it off. It is about producing a report looking at the implications which will catch all of the issues that I have addressed in terms of price, affordability, availability, the disparities in different regions, and isolating whether it is possible to introduce a relief for the non-hotel beds sector that has been identified but where the hotel beds rate would revert to the 13.5% rate. When I talk about hotel beds, I am conscious that those hotel beds also include guest houses and other such forms of accommodation.