Mr. Paul Keeley:

The first issue is access into the regions. Dublin Airport dominates the market share and is the key entry point into the country.

If we want to support rural tourism, it is important to be able to get great ground transport solutions in place. I have two comments. We need some resolution on the car rental piece; but the other piece, on which we are making some progress, is working with the likes of Local Link in terms of getting the good last-mile solutions in place so that we can link key regional towns with their hinterland. Progress on those two would be helpful.

The other piece is accommodation. We had a session recently with some of the banks and financial advisers in this territory. There is zero appetite among the financial community for investing in accommodation outside the key urban centres. It is one of those things. A classic for us from our destination-development perspective is that if we want to get the full value of the visitor economy we need the bed nights, but sometimes it can be difficult to encourage the beds into an area if people do not feel there are enough things to see and do. We get that inherent contradiction. For us, it is like a mosaic. We must have accommodation. If we want it, and we want to move at speed then we are going to need to incentivise the market to do it.