John O'Donoghue (Kerry South, Fianna Fail)

I am fully supportive of the promotion of the country for walking and activity holidays in general. In that context, the Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív, established Comhairle na Tuaithe which is charged with seeking to resolve difficulties in regard to access to land for hill walkers and therefore comes within the remit of that Minister. I am fully supportive of his efforts in this respect.

As part of An Agreed Programme for Government, the Government has been making a major effort to promote the country in mainland Europe. On becoming Minister I endeavoured to concentrate much of the resources and efforts in building up the European market and I am very pleased it is working out. An increase of 20% in visitors from mainland Europe last year was quite a stupendous performance when one considers that revenue from mainland European visitors is now almost on a par with that from British visitors to Ireland. This shows we have made tremendous progress.

As a result of a dip in visitors from Britain in the year before last, we immediately brought forward a strategy to adopt an aggressive approach to the British market following the most intensive ever survey of that market. This strategy has yielded results. Statistics for last year show an increase of 3.8% over the previous year which is very significant as the number of visitors coming to Ireland from Britain is extremely high at 4.75 million per annum. In general terms there has been a major effort to try to bring in more people from nearer destinations and I am confident this will be welcomed by everybody. We will continue our efforts in the North American market as it remains extremely important.

With regard to the increases in the price of fuel, we do not have any great influence over what happens. The tourism agencies are conscious of this factor and are seeking to make Ireland as attractive as possible.

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