Mr. Paul Kelly:

I will comment on a couple of factors. The Deputy's point regarding confidence is really important. There is significant nervousness and concern about people going out to restaurants, going on holidays in Ireland and so on. To that end, we have developed the Fáilte Ireland Covid-19 Safety Charter. Under normal circumstances, this project would have taken a year or so to develop. We turned this around in about six weeks. We launched it to industry last week. By signing up for the charter, industry members are effectively declaring they will implement all the operating guidelines Fáilte Ireland has developed based on public health advice and in liaison with the various Government Departments. They are also declaring that all of their staff have received the appropriate training in infection control and under the return to work protocol, and they are committing to make themselves available for inspection and assessment.

We launched the safety charter to industry last Thursday and we already have more than 700 businesses signed up to it. As of yesterday, something like 15,000 employees have been through the free online training Fáilte Ireland has provided for those businesses. The campaign will be launched to the public this coming weekend. On top of the money we are investing in the "Ireland, make a break for it" campaign, we are investing approximately €1 million in a public information campaign explaining what the safety charter is. That campaign will be breaking this coming weekend and it is specifically designed to give people reassurance and confidence.

The "Ireland, make a break for it" campaign is a significant, heavyweight campaign. We launched it last weekend with television and radio advertisements and double spreads. We were getting a phenomenal reaction and trending in the top five on social media all weekend. It is getting an excellent public reaction. We do not know the business impact yet because it probably will be another week or so before we see the bookings data coming through, but the public reaction has been phenomenal. It is a really heavyweight campaign, and another factor is that the timing of it was very carefully done. Under the Government roadmap, tourism was not going to open until 20 July but that was brought forward, fortunately, to 29 June. Despite its being brought forward, we were ready to go. It would have been inappropriate for us to launch this campaign any earlier because we would have been conflicting with Government public health advice. We cannot have one arm of the Government saying people must stay within 20 km of their homes and another arm saying they should take holidays around the country. We had to wait until the appropriate time, in line with public advice health, to launch our campaign. As soon as the timing was okay, we were ready to go with it.

It is important to say that any good campaign has to be based on consumer insight as to what will motivate people to travel. That consumer feeling and sentiment, as we are all aware, has changed massively week by week. Doing something that was based on consumer insight five or six weeks ago would have been wrong. We had to understand where people's heads were at.