Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

I thank Deputy Mitchell for her good wishes. We share the same interest in this area of tourism, culture and sport, and I look forward to working with this Department.

There are a number of issues in this regard. I accept that there is a potential problem here for the tourist industry generally. However, the model that the car hire industry has been using has always insisted on new cars. The car hire industry will raise arguments about warranties, guarantees, etc., but perhaps it should be looking to include good-quality second-hand cars as well because there are thousands of them on the forecourts of the garages, and there may be potential in that area. There may also be potential for the car hire industry to use cars with lower CO2 emissions because these are obviously cheaper in VRT terms, and perhaps it could benefit from that.

In looking at the costs comparable to other capital cities, so far this month Dublin would seem to be comparable with major cities. Certainly, coming into the summer the prices on offer are comparable, but already we are seeing that August will be more expensive in Ireland than elsewhere. That is not acceptable because that will even damage the tourist industry that we have, notwithstanding that other people might be impacted about there not being a sufficient number of cars.

A subsidy scheme was introduced a number of years ago and it was a direct handout to the car industry. If we were to do that now, it would be money that would come from the tourism budget. It would come directly from other projects because no extra funding is available. It would be questionable as to whether it would conflict with EU state-aid rules because one would be subsidising directly, not merely to a particular industry but to a very limited one because four companies control 80% of the market.

There are issues surrounding it. I expect the tourist industry to make proposals to me as to what they see might be the solution, and I would be happy to engage with them on their ideas.

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