Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)

I will put some context behind that. In the past three months, we have gone to an increase. It was a 6% increase in October. That shows a significant turnaround. We had approximately 10% less flights coming into our economy over the past year. For example, for this winter we will have around 12% more flights coming in, 17% more from North America, 13% more from Germany, 8% more from France and 9% more from the UK. That will provide an additional opportunity for us to grow the sector. We are aligning a new strategic aviation scheme where new routes open up. This year, we have opened up Denver, Nashville and Detroit, bringing us to 21 gateways in North America. We need to have our Tourism Ireland staff in particular aligned on the ground, which was not the case heretofore, to grasp that opportunity and ensure they are getting the networks with the travel operators to bring people here to our country.

Second, we are lengthening our season. We are going to do a lot of work by bringing it from St. Brigid's Day right out the whole way to the home of Hallowe'en period and beyond. We can really structure that so the 50% of tourists who come from May to September; we want to elongate that. We have about 11,500 hotel rooms now under construction that will be delivered next year. A total of 8,500 of those are in Dublin. We can do a lot more in that space. We have about 36,000 currently in the planning process. In more regional areas, we need to do more work as a Government to try to bring forward an accommodation strategy next year in areas where we need additional accommodation. This is something Deputy Brennan also is very much committed to. We have reduced our capacity on State contracts from 13% down to under 5% now. One key thing I want to do is to bring forward a culinary strategy next year, which will look at our food and beverage offering. There is the distillery trail that Fáilte Ireland launched last Friday with 26 distilleries and visitor experiences around the country, which will add to that. It is on foot of all those initiatives and the growth we are going to have now that in every single trade mission, tourism will have its voice along with Enterprise Ireland and IDA, which was not the case heretofore. That will change how we market the product. It will change the value proposition that we are offering in terms of accommodation and our food offering, which will be significant. Critically, which I am pushing Fáilte Ireland on now, is that we will go down and work hand in glove with our SMEs, that is, the 46,000 businesses that are offering our product.

If we look at the statistics again, 80% of visitors who come into our country are using online portals to book and research activities. A total of 30% are using generative AI to plan out their itinerary. That is why we need to work with businesses and State agencies to develop their online digital capacity. I will be pushing that we have a 90% target by 2030 in terms of digital process innovation with our SMEs and we are working so hard with them to do that. The opportunity is there. We will more flights and more numbers coming in. I want to drive the domestic activity as well through some of those mature markets that Deputies Brennan, McCormack and Conway-Walsh will be aware of in the west and midlands that we need to push hard. We invest a lot in the Hidden Heartlands and other brands like that but we need to grow them now and get the capital expenditure in. We will be working closely with Fáilte Ireland under a new chief executive with great energy and a refreshed board to deliver in this sector.