Micheál Carrigy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests. I was in the Seanad up to now. I apologise for missing the beginning of the session. I am pretty much in agreement with many of my colleagues. I am a member of a Government party and I come from a rural area. I am involved with County Longford tourism and have been for a long number of years. We have been trying to build a product in a county that was miles away from the routes taken by many bus tours and others. I worked with a colleague, former Deputy Kevin Boxer Moran, who will be quite well-known to the committee, to highlight the need for a tourism product in the midlands. We successfully got this included in the programme for Government and ultimately developed the Hidden Heartlands brand name. Having another brand was not on the radar for Tourism Ireland but we were successful. It has proved to be successful because there is a need for slow, easy tourism which is off the main highways and byways of Ireland's Ancient East, the Wild Atlantic Way and gets people out of the cities.

I am not in favour of this proposed legislation proceeding as drafted. A figure of 12,000 was mentioned. I do not think that is realistic, to be quite honest. I do not think this legislation should go ahead until we see sight of guidelines, etc., in relation to it. My view is that it needs to be set aside for 12 or 18 months. We have a situation at the minute. if you were looking to come down to visit my own home county and area, you probably would not get a place to stay at all at present. I do not want to see a situation where we implement legislation which completely rules out any sort of accommodation and sees other people pulling out of the market. I do not think now is the time for us to be dealing with this. I fully agree with the registration process. That is important. While working with Tourism Ireland, we always tried to push everybody to register to ensure we have a set standard across all accommodation.

That is a must.

I apologise if my next question has been asked already. It concerns international providers, such as Airbnb and Expedia, operating in other European countries where legislation similar to what is being proposed here has been introduce. What have the results been? Is there a similar example European wide?