John O'Donoghue (Kerry South, Fianna Fail)

It is obvious that tourism is treated extremely seriously by the Government. As this country's largest international indigenous service industry, it is of enormous importance to the economy. When one includes carriage costs, it generates approximately €4.2 billion per annum. The largest number of visitors to visit Ireland in a single year visited Ireland last year. All the sectors and regions did not benefit equally, however. The increasing tendency among tourists to take shorter breaks has meant that tourism growth in the Dublin region has been greater than that in the western region, for example. Most, although not all, regions experienced some tourism growth last year.

It is clear that the main problem that needs to be addressed is the lack of access to the western region. When I visited the United States last autumn, I had fruitful discussions with representatives of American Airlines, which is the largest airline in the world. Deputy Cowley is aware that the airline proposes to fly into Shannon Airport from May. It will be the first time that it will have flown into Ireland. That the airline operates direct routes to 42 locations in the United States gives an indication of its size. Ryanair's decision to develop Shannon Airport as a European hub will assist the western region, as will the funding to be allocated by the Government to Knock Airport, which was announced by the Minister for Transport recently.

If we continue to improve access to the western region, we will continue to increase the number of people visiting it. That is not the only way to resolve the problem raised by the Deputy, however. We also need to examine how we market the regions. As I said in my initial response, the way in which that is done by the State agencies has been entirely changed. It is necessary to examine the relationship between the regional tourism authorities and the State agencies. While we established the new statutory body, Tourism Ireland, we did not redefine the relationships between it and regional tourism authorities or between those authorities and Fáilte Ireland, the former Bord Fáilte. In this context, Fáilte Ireland is finalising proposals arising from the report it commissioned from PricewaterhouseCoopers. It must be decided whether the integration of regional tourism authorities and State agencies would result in better services locally and facilitate more focused marketing mechanisms to attract a greater number of visitors to the west.

I acknowledge the problems involved and appreciate the level of difficulty they imply. We are taking stringent measures to resolve them.

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