Noel Harrington (Cork South West, Fine Gael)
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I welcome the visitors to the committee. They made interesting presentations which were different in many ways, even though from the same region.

They might comment on an opinion I hold that we all think we are the centre of our own universe and every region, town and small area believes that it can double its tourism product merely by announcing it. Tourists will sort out their access and then they will sort out their accommodation. From wherever one comes, particularly for overseas visitors, one is limited by the access and accommodation infrastructure. Many of the issues we must deal with are exactly that there are ceilings on what we can deal with. I refer to overseas visitors because that is really what we are talking about here in terms of a national tourism product. From that point of view, is access infrastructure, whether air or ferry, an issue for both of the groups because they are in a peripheral area, like mine in west Cork, where it is an issue?

I might ask Mr. Hynes and Ms Grehan this as well. I served on Cork County Council for a number of years and one of the debates that was constantly being thrown at us was the clash between one's core functions as a local authority and the funds one spends to attract tourists to one's county. For example, if the local authority funds something, it might throw €30,000 to a worthy initiative to fund a tourism project, all of a sudden one would get a group asking should the local authority look more at its roads than at funding tourism and are there not tourism organisations to do that.

I agree with Mr. Casey's point about keep the local tourism organisations' effort as near to the community or region as possible. We had one in west Cork, West Cork Tourism, which, unfortunately, exhausted itself. We identified that one of our major problems was ferry access into Cork to serve west Cork and south Kerry, West Cork Tourism put a Herculean effort into acquiring a vessel for the Cork-Swansea route and, in the end, it failed for one or two reasons. It could have succeeded but the effort it took sucked the life from the West Cork Tourism project and it is finding it difficult to get that kick-started.

In talking about having a local tourism organisation, is there any merit in saying that Ireland is a small country and tourists come here for different reasons, for example, on golf holidays? If one were a golf enthusiast in the United States and looked online, he or she would say there are golf holidays in Cork and in Mayo, and could get a myriad of results. One could get 20 different organisations offering golf holidays. At the end of it, he or she will decide to go to Spain instead because Spain provides one golf holiday product and will direct him or her to it. Would there be any merit in identifying sectoral tourism products nationally so that, whether it is genealogy, activities, sports or city breaks, there is one port? One could be engaging and ask whether there is both a city and a genealogical interest, for example, Dublin and, maybe, Mayo, where one could tie-in both, but that it is a sectoral rather than a geographical issue. One would be defining one's product, focusing on it and providing somebody who is focused with what he or she wants.

I looked at the Pure Life Pure Irish website. Mr. O'Hara's message is strong on anti-fracking. It is only an observation - I do not want to go into the anti-fracking debate - but one point he made is it collapsed in some parts of the United States because the price of gas collapsed. That is what we want.