Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 3 May 2023

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

Developing Rural Tourism: Discussion

Mr. Adrian Cummins:

I will be brief. With regard to the question about careers, we need to bring the issue of careers in tourism and hospitality right into primary schools and not just into secondary schools. It has to be on the syllabus across the entire country, and not just in certain schools. That is an issue for the Department of Education. We have written to the Department of Education and we have had a conversation with officials about the introduction of cooking on the syllabus across all ages. We would like to sit down with them face to face and have a good conversation about how we could roll that out. We can see from our colleagues in Greece, 25% of whose GDP comes from tourism, how seriously they have taken it. They have now rolled out their tourism and hospitality syllabus into primary school. Last week, we met with the president of the hotel association in Greece, who is also the president of the Confederation of National Associations of Hotels, Restaurants, Cafés and Similar Establishments in the European Union and European Economic Area, HOTREC. We are a member of that. He showed us the syllabus. That is an example of how we could introduce this into the primary code.