Mr. Donall O'Keeffe:

As we said in our opening statement, we believe Fáilte Ireland's marketing campaign to attract people to tourism is very positive and welcome.

We believe it should be expanded to hospitality. If one listens to the radio at present, it is naturally and understandably tourism focused. One would not make the connection from the advertisement to working in pubs. We believe it has to be expanded to market hospitality as well as tourism because they are very complementary and completely interlinked but they are still a little separate.

For us, a State agency being responsible for training for hospitality and, as part of that, marketing careers in hospitality is probably the best way to go. We believe, and the pandemic exposed it, that hospitality falls between Fáilte Ireland, SOLAS, further education, enterprise, finance and tourism. We spent a lot of time, pre-Covid-19, seeking a response when we had issues being moved between the Departments in terms of who is responsible. Hospitality needs a mother Department that takes responsibility for training and development for the sector. As we said in our opening statement, there are real issues this summer, but there are also real long-term issues. Please God we will be in a full employment economy over the medium term. The country has emerged from the pandemic in strong economic condition and we see every sector, not just ours, screaming for staff. Construction is very lightly staffed, hospitality is very lightly staffed and retailers are looking for staff. Building skills capability for hospitality is the way forward in the long term, and that is something that takes time and effort. It has to be State-led because, with the best will in the world, trade bodies or representative bodies do not have the capacity to develop national training programmes. For it to be State-led some entity has to be charged with leading it.