Ms Joanne Grehan:

The majority of the website’s traffic is from North America, Canada, UK and Ireland. We have a good following on Twitter and Facebook. We have liked Dara Ó Briain, RTE news and Mayo GAA which keeps our traffic going. Of course, Mayo is still waiting for its best friend that we have not seen in a good few years even though we have been a long time trying, namely, the Sam Maguire Cup. Many of our shared posts on our Facebook page are of Mayo photographs and sporting events. Sport connects peoples to their county and Mayo has great athletes and leaders in sports.

The website needs to develop to remain fresh. We want to encapsulate and showcase Mayo as a place to live, work, locate, invest in, as well as visit and revisit. The website wants to highlight Mayo’s green, clean and sustainable environment, as Mr. Hynes pointed out. We will ensure traffic to mayo.ie will be grown and delivers on as the home of all things Mayo.

We have made a submission to the tourism policy review. We are strong on connecting the Wild Atlantic Way into the county with special observation points marked out with the team working on that. We are concentrating on outdoors, well-being and fitness activities with our national wilderness parks. Ballina is considered the salmon fishing capital of Europe. Other tourism specialties include shooting, golf, soft adventure, triathlons and spiritual tourism. Regarding the latter, we have Knock shrine and Croagh Patrick, a holy mountain. We need to start putting programmes together which will provide a health wellness and pilgrimage path. We see much potential in coastal trials. It should be noted our cliffs in Belmullet and Achill Island are higher than those in County Clare. The world kite-surfing championships were recently held in Mayo. Several web summit attendees came from Dublin to Achill Island to participate in the championship.

Up to 48% of overseas visitors to Mayo arrive through Ireland West Airport. We want to see that grow. We have been successful with building our relationships over the past several years. We have won several good bids such as the Ireland Golf Tour Operator Association conference, as well as international and national legal conferences. We believe working in partnership is key.