Ms Mary Nash:

The Senator is right that there is a concern. In a way, we are on an unknown journey at the moment and we do not know how the lack of bed spaces will impact on festivals. I can imagine that people may not be travelling from abroad but for a lot of our festivals, the patrons are Irish, for example, people who travel down to Wexford, to the Electric Picnic and so on. In any case, there may be other ways or they may just go back home. I do not know if the Arts Council has been doing any monitoring of the numbers. In a way, we will have to wait and see.

On the other issue, I will come back to the Senator with the response from our tourism colleagues.