Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 3 May 2023

Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport And Media

Developing Rural Tourism: Discussion

Mr. Paul Keeley:

I will certainly do that and maybe Ms Carroll will want to jump in as well. Where we invest is guided by our understanding of what the needs are, destination by destination. We work through the four regional strategies and then with more localised plans doing that classic gap analysis, looking at the maturity of the destination and its product mix and mapping that versus where the growth potential lies. From that, we identify which pieces are missing from the overall destination jigsaw, for want of a better term.

Depending on the maturity of a location, in some mature locations some of our focus and investment can be around traffic management, parking and simple things like moving people away from pinch points. In other areas, the gaps are about a need for an attractor of scale to actually put the place on the map. We will flex accordingly to make sure the schemes we bring through do that job of work. We come back to this issue of sustainability. If we want to be credible in this space, we have to get that regional dispersal, and we are tracking our impact in that regard. We also want to create sustainable businesses and that means the season cannot be a short six- or eight-week season. We want to spread the business out into the shoulders, and again, that may point to particular product issues which need to be addressed with regard to giving people the rainy day opportunity. From our perspective, we flex accordingly. Some of that will be done by Ms Carroll through our strategic partnerships with other State agencies. Some of it will be open-call grant schemes etc., but all the time informed by what the particular development need is in different parts of the country. There will be a close alignment between where we are trying to drive growth and where those investments go.