Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

I wish to share time with Deputy Ó Snodaigh.

The Labour Party is pleased to welcome the Bill. It is narrow in scope and the service it confers, which is to authorise the availability of liquor in the specified circumstances given expression to in its provisions, is necessary. I do not have any dispute with it.

The conference centre is an essential part of the tourism infrastructure in Dublin and in the country. Against a background of a 15-year boom, we have few landmark buildings to show for it but this appears to be such a building. It seems a splendid building to me and although I have not been on the inside yet, I am told the facilities are excellent and it is a building of which we can be proud.

The Minister stated it was built as a PPP. It was constructed at the height of the boom when we could not count the revenues coming in. We did not count them and when we did, we counted them incorrectly. I wonder whether this should have been a PPP. Why could it not have been built a great deal more cheaply on behalf of the taxpayer than through a PPP? I would like to hear the Minister's view on that if it differs from mine.

What is the status of the planning application for the adjacent hotel? According to the press release, Treasury Holdings "submitted plans for Dublin's biggest hotel on the site of the new convention centre...planning permission for a 35-storey hotel with 488 bedrooms". There may well be an argument for appropriate hotel accommodation adjacent to the centre for all the reasons most of us have experienced. Such provision is not otherwise available in the immediate vicinity but, at the same time, 15,000 hotel rooms too many were built during the boom, largely through property-based tax incentives, with the calamitous fall-out we know about. How does the Minister reconcile the overhang of property with this application?

If ever there was a monument to the Celtic tiger, it is the shell of the Anglo Irish Bank building through which one can see from the dockside beside the conference centre. It could be adapted for hotel purposes because it certainly will never function as the headquarters of Anglo Irish Bank. In fairness to the DDDA, before it became enmeshed with that bank and the cross directorships that have led to virtual ruin for the banking system, the authority was doing a good job and it had lifted the area but that shell of a building will not function as the headquarters of a bank that does not function or trade.

The pricing signifies that the facility is aimed entirely at foreign tourist and business. It is prohibitively priced in the context of the domestic market and I presume that means its focus is exclusively on attracting business tourism from outside the State. I would like the Minister to comment on that.

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