Mr. Niall Gibbons:

Regarding Brexit, we established a Brexit task force the week after the UK voted to leave the European Union. We have conducted approximately five or six waves of research in our key markets of North America, Germany, France and Britain to see the impacts in respect of travel to Ireland.

In terms of the major standing, first, if the UK was to leave without a deal on 1 January there might be a possible depreciation of sterling, which makes Ireland more expensive. Second, in the context of Covid-19, there are a number of what appear to be very small issues but they matter to families travelling. For example, what is their situation with regard to the European health insurance card for people who travel from the UK, which is a third country now? The situation with regard to car insurance and pet passports are trivial in the context of Covid but in the context of summer holidays how will they impact on people's capacity to travel?

The other issue which works to our advantage is the fact that the common travel area will continue post 1 January. That is something Ireland will enjoy as a competitive advantage vis-à-visBritish people travelling to the Continent from 1 January onward.

The other concern we have is that on the Northern Ireland front the research we have conducted on France and Germany indicates a level of confusion among consumers who pick up their newspaper, do not know the details of our politics here and decide that it might be a lot of hassle to come to Ireland with all that is going on at the Border. They may wonder if they can cross it, for instance. We are getting those questions from German and French travel operators. It is a minor hassle but enough for people to say, "I'll leave it this year and I might go next year when all the issues have settled down". We are on top of those issues. Our Brexit task force met again last month. It consists of senior members of the UK and Irish travel industries. We plan to meet again in the first week or two of January when, hopefully, we will have a clear answer as to where we are going.

On the overseas issues, the Deputy mentioned travel influencers on TikTok. We have a range of things going on in the digital space. Our new Ireland.comsuite of websites has just been launched in 12 different languages. It is for English speaking countries, such as the US and Britain, and for France, Germany, Japan, China, etc. We also have a digital marketing project which will include more personalisation in terms of advertising.

Regarding social media, we have a new strategy under way that is looking at the areas the Deputy spoke about such as TikTok and other new media that can reach a new audience that traditional platforms like Facebook do not meet. In terms of where we stand right now, Facebook is still colossal for us. We are the fourth largest agency in the world on Facebook and Twitter. We have 4.5 million friends on it and they all have an average of 200 friends each. If we can get everybody to like our share about Ireland, we will reach an audience of more than 900 million people. They are still very significant platforms but things are changing rapidly in the area.

On the traffic light system, we were very pleased to see it come in. It is also complicated by the fact that the UK is not operating the traffic light system. It is operating air corridors. We did an analysis to see what would have been open, in terms of Covid infection rates, if the traffic light system had been in place since last March. Britain could have been open to us during the summer for a few months, and Germany also, but a market like the United States is completely outside the zone; it is in the red zone. The traffic light system combined with the comprehensive track and trace system, and hopefully a vaccine, will see us open the doors next summer.