Mr. Paul Kelly:

I thank the Cathaoirleach and members for the invitation. In 2019, tourism accounted for 260,000 jobs. In some counties, as many as one in five jobs relied on tourism. In 2020, sector revenue has declined by a massive €6 billion and hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost. While revenue stopped for businesses, the costs did not and the stress on business owners is immense.

Fáilte Ireland’s response has been comprehensive. Our Covid advisory group of industry, agencies and Department officials has met 26 times. We have refunded €3 million to businesses in fees and delivered 14 separate suites of online support tools, which have been accessed half a million times by industry. We developed and continuously update 11 sets of sectoral safety guidelines, which have been accessed 90,000 times. On business tourism, Fáilte Ireland, working with industry, continued to win future business. This year, we generated 206 new conference leads worth €121 million and our total future leads pipeline is now worth more than €1 billion. We delivered 12 virtual international sales platforms with over 2,000 global business tourism buyers.

On international leisure tourism, we supported more than 1,100 Irish industry members to engage with international buyers on 17 virtual sales platforms organised in Ireland by Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland’s overseas platforms.

We launched a major new summer marketing campaign, Make a Break for It. We also launched the Fáilte Ireland Covid safety charter designed to deliver, and instil confidence in, safety in tourism. Thus far, 5,000 businesses have registered. This week, we are launching campaigns to promote safe indoor dining and to promote accommodation gift vouchers. We also established 23 local recovery task forces nationwide.

In addition to our own programme, we have provided extensive analysis and input to our Department, the tourism recovery task force and wider Government to inform the July stimulus, budget 2021 and ongoing supports. We are administering four new grant schemes for Covid adaptation, bed and breakfast accommodation restart, coach tourism and inbound agents. Combined through these four schemes, we hope to distribute €54 million to more than 12,000 businesses. Budget 2021 allocated an additional €55 million for strategic tourism business survival, and we are currently developing this scheme. Extensive research informs all this. Since March we have completed 27 separate research projects, thereby getting insights from 3,000 businesses and 32,000 individuals.

I acknowledge the work of the Fáilte Ireland team and our Department on behalf of the tourism industry. In addition to this, the Fáilte Ireland team has also contributed significantly to the wider national effort from helping speedy processing of the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, applications to working with the HSE in developing the "Keep Your Distance" and "Hold Firm" communication campaigns.

Looking to the future, while the industry is very grateful for the very significant Government support, the severity and longevity of restrictions means that for many, current supports will not be enough. Insolvencies have started and will accelerate after Christmas unless something significant changes.

Tourism will recover and the speed of Ireland's recovery will primarily be determined by how many tourism businesses have survived. We cannot rebuild employment without employers so we must not shy away from providing the business supports required, and to do so would be to abandon regional development and self-sustaining rural communities.