Mr. Paul Kelly:

We have a county-by-county breakdown. We worked with our colleagues in the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth to get that county-by-county breakdown of the stock that is being used for humanitarian reasons. We can circulate that to the committee. We do not have the total occupancy but it is the stock that is under contract to International Protection Accommodation Services, IPAS. We will share that. It shows disparate figures in some counties. In some counties the stock is up in the region of 80% or 90%. We do not have a breakdown by star rating because that is not how the information is provided to us. I am not sure whether we could produce that. However the Deputy’s point is absolutely right. The three-star type of accommodation stands out first and foremost followed by the four-star. That is because of the economics of it. What the hotels can earn in the tourism market versus what they can earn by having full occupancy on a Government contract means the economics work better for the provider. Deputy Griffin is right, it is coming out at that lower end of the market. As challenging as that is, it is better from a wider tourism point of view that it is coming out there rather than at the higher end of the market.

On the point about conferences, we provide a bounty per delegate. That is an important tool to secure conferences. Conferences are generally secured many years in advance. That bounty per delegate is part of that. The year ahead, 2023, looks good for Dublin and Ireland in general from a conference point of view. Most of that business was won a long time ago before we faced into the current challenges. We are now working on conferences that will be held in 2025, 2026, all the way out to 2030 and beyond. Those per-delegate bounties are important to secure those conferences. We have put extra effort and weight into supporting and improving the regional dispersion of conference business into Kerry, Shannon, Cork and Galway where there are convention bureaus and the facilities to host them. We have made significant progress on that and achieved a better regional spread. We continue to work on that. We put disproportionate support into regional conferences. We are cognisant of managing, and we will not be chasing more conferences in Dublin for 2023, because of the capacity situation. However it is important that we keep chasing those conferences for future years because we do not know what the situation will be. It is also important to know that a hotel bed taken by a conference delegate is worth more to the Irish economy than a hotel bed taken by almost anyone else because of the spend per delegate it brings into the economy, not just in tourism but into entertainment, audiovisual equipment, food and beverage and into the whole wider economy. That spend per delegate is higher. The best place to put a hotel bed from an Irish economy point of view is to a conference delegate.