Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

This a serious issue for the car hire industry and the tourism sector. The Minister will be aware of the significant rental operations located in various business parks in our constituency. It now costs far more to hire a car in Ireland than in France and most other European countries. The supply of cars has diminished at a time when dealers would like to sell vehicles. The current structure is driving prices up to unsustainable levels, with major implications for tourism outside the Dublin region because most people who arrive in Dublin or Shannon want to hire cars to tour the country.

One of the Minister's predecessors, Deputy Quinn, introduced a number of initiatives during the time of the rainbow coalition Government to resolve the bottleneck in the Irish car hire business. The Minister can take his officials' advice on the appropriate mechanisms that can be implemented to address this issue but it has to be addressed. We need to re-invent tourism in Ireland in the context of our changed financial circumstances. Attaining value for money in car hire is one of the things people booking long or short stay holidays seek especially through the Internet, which vast numbers of tourism customers use for on-line bookings. We are not scoring in this regard because car hire is prohibitively expensive in Ireland at present.

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