Mr. James McGinley:

Following on from the points raised, there is the matter of coach parking in the towns and cities. It seems all these businesses in all these towns want the passengers who are coming on these coaches, yet they do not want to see the coaches in the town centres. If one goes to Europe, all the towns and cities welcome the coaches. There is always a coach station in the middle of a town visitors can get off at. Barring a couple of towns that have embraced them, including Ennis, Sligo and Killarney, most others do not have town centre parking for coaches. That is definitely a huge disadvantage when you are bringing in coachloads of visitors to the town centres. You have to drop them off, arrange a time to pick them up, come back and maybe wait if somebody is missing. You may have a parking attendant trying to move you on or whatever. There are huge issues there.

The other point raised was around infrastructure. During the Celtic tiger years we saw great investment in our roads throughout the country, but most of the investment was on routes out of Dublin going to the main cities. Unfortunately, most of the coach tourists we are carrying are going outside those routes to the west and east coasts, so huge investment is needed in roads. My county of Donegal has no rail lines and if you are travelling from Dublin, you must go by road, travelling on the A5. I was on that road today. It made headlines in the last week for all the wrong reasons, due to that loss of life in an accident. It is a ridiculous piece of road. That it is the main road north to Donegal and Derry is ridiculous in this day and age. Improvements and huge investment are needed in infrastructure northwards to my own county and outwards towards the tourist areas of all the other counties in the country.