Ms Joanne Grehan:

There were 303 gatherings in Mayo this year. We are in a very powerful position now with our communities to continue that momentum and build traction out of it. We had a business gathering with Cleveland and Cuyahoga County in Ohio. That town has 1.2 million people, of whom over 250,000 are from Mayo and specifically from Achill Island. That is the power of the connection of those people and their place and our place, which is Achill Island. On the back of that very successful tourism business gathering, a number of enterprise related pipeline leads have been generated. This is very similar to the Greenway, which provided a platform for local people to establish and grow a business and develop their own brand. If we continue these relationships and develop a mix of the online and the personal, we have an opportunity to drive that forward and see greater numbers and opportunities and benefits coming through.

Our unit in mayo.ie is just a year young at the moment, but we need to showcase our product wealth. We gave the committee a little flavour of that, but we need to push it out there. It is not just about the product; it is also about the experience. We are trying to think of innovative ways that we can do that. The cost of the website for the last two years was a benefit-in-kind cost from the local authority staff, whose IT staff designed it inhouse. We put about €5,000 into developing the brand and we would like to see that upgraded now that it has developed traction. This year, for the first time, we will see directly into that website and the social media and time challenges, which our Leitrim speaker raised, come to about €50,000. If we do not invest now when we have the numbers engaged, we are going to lose that traction.

The airport plays a central role because it connects us to so many people. The airport has relationships with airlines and operators that the communities on the ground do not. The western regional tourism marketing programme was a collaboration between five local authorities - Donegal, Sligo, Leitrim, Roscommon and Mayo - the Western Development Commission, and I co-ordinated it at the time, and Ireland West Airport in Knock. The counties put in €30,000 each and the WDC put in €50,000. The airport matched that total of €200,000 and Fáilte Ireland matched it on a 3:2 ratio with €600,000, which led to a total of €1 million. Tourism Ireland then leveraged its connections with airlines and tour operators internationally in designated locations that would come into the country, which cost €1.4 million. The power of all that netted the value. If we were planning that again, we would plan it much further in advance and start it much earlier, so that more people would come directly into our area.