Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)

I thank the Deputy for his huge ambition in the sector and his passion. He is a firm advocate for tourism. We have met and shared ideas on the sector. If we look at the evidence, during the first ten months of this year we brought in about 5.4 million visitors. The previous year ten month comparable was 5.8 million. We are about 6% below 2024, which was a bumper year. We always look for the evidence as to what explains the reduction. From January right through to May, we had a cap. We had a reduction of 10% in flights coming into our country. That was a significant challenge in getting additional visitors in. We see in the past three months that we have increased our visitor numbers now and that is how I want to continue it. I do not want to set it as a bleak future horizon. We have so much opportunity for tourism in future. We had a bumper year in 2024, but we have 5.8 million people that have come into our country in a little over ten months. This demonstrates a good pathway for the future. Our job is to get the spend up.

One striking statistic I looked at when people talk about a value proposition is that when domestic people in here in Ireland travel outside of Ireland, they spend more on food and beverages than do people coming from overseas into Ireland. That shows the opportunity for domestic tourism as well in getting people to do more staycations, investing in our attractions around the country and investing in our hotels through Fáilte Ireland - we are doing a lot more in relation to that - and ensuring that we have the exciting opportunities, particularly with our just transition funding in the midlands. We have so many blueways, greenways, walkways and trails. I want to do a lot more with our lakes with fishing. We can have a lot more opportunities in relation to that. I recall a time when we talked about our European markets being under pressure that if you visited some of our local lakes, there were many German tourists out fishing. We want to get back to try to attract markets like that. That is why I want to get resources and boots on the ground with Tourism Ireland to get our overseas numbers back up again and into a position where we are going to start increasing them by about 6% per annum, grow our domestic tourism market and critically, get down close to our businesses, work with them and develop them. Where I want Fáilte Ireland to be is developing the business model to make them more sustainable in order that they can offer a strong proposition to people coming into our country.

There is a challenge in rural areas to make hotels viable. That is a whole-of-government approach. It is something the Government needs to consider because it is challenging. For example, in Leitrim and other areas, it can be difficult to make the commercial financial decisions stack up. We have a lot of work to do in that regard. I am happy to work with Deputy Brennan on that as we bring forward an accommodation strategy next year to try to solve some of those challenging questions.