Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 2 December 2020

Joint Committee on Media, Tourism, Arts, Culture, Sport and the Gaeltacht

Impact of Covid-19 on the Tourism Sector: Discussion

One needs a group of experts as there is a great deal of EU legislation to take into account. We will be doing that with our Department based on the input that we received from the industry, and on the other Government supports that are there; we will be working through that.

As to when this will happen, we will be announcing the details in the first quarter of next year. We have four schemes under way at the moment. We have the adaptation scheme, we are administering the bed and breakfast accommodation restart scheme and the coach tourism scheme for €10 million, and we have the inbound agents’ scheme for €10 million also. We have a total of €54 million between those schemes that we are trying to get out to businesses. We have started work on the next €55 million and have started designing the scheme based on all the inputs that we are receiving from the industry. We hope to have further news on that in the first quarter of 2021. I am not saying that we will have the detail of the full €55 million by the first quarter of 2021 because we may end up doing that as a number of different schemes. We are looking at all of the options at this stage and we may end up with it being a phased process. We do not know what the challenges that businesses later on in the year and across next year are going to be. We have got to-----

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