Mary Upton (Dublin South Central, Labour)

I am interested in Deputy Carey's contribution. I support almost anything he says about County Clare. However, I must talk about the convention centre in Dublin today.

I welcome the Bill and have no difficulty supporting it. It would be totally unrealistic and completely impractical if we had any negatives on providing a licensing facility for the convention centre. I was lucky enough to have had a tour of the convention centre earlier this week. Apart from being amazingly visually attractive from the outside, although I have no architectural experience, it is a fabulous, state of the art building. Technologically, it seems to be up there with the very best convention centre one could expect to find anywhere in the world, certainly in Europe. It is clear that whatever needs to be put in place must be put in place to ensure we can attract the large tourism business groups that will be important to make it viable economically.

I am told the conference centre can cater for anything from eight to 8,000. If one can imagine dealing with 8,000 tourists in one centre at any one time, one will get an idea of how competent and efficient the system must be in order to provide for that. It is clear that the provision of the licensing facility is hugely important.

I refer to the tourism industry and how important it is to the country. Unfortunately, in 2009 everything that could go wrong did go wrong in terms of tourism. It was a very bad year for the country. I hope that despite the forces of nature being against us in terms of ash clouds that the situation will improve later this year. For that to happen we must look carefully at how our tourism industry is managed. For instance, when we bring business tourists to Dublin we hope that they will have the facility to move around the country to see the other tourism attractions. Even within the city of Dublin, as has been mentioned on numerous occasions, signage is poor relative to other European countries. I was in County Clare recently and the signage when travelling around the country also leaves much to be desired. These are small, practical matters.

If we are attracting international tourists, whom we will clearly be targeting for the convention centre, then a language facility will be required in order to support such groups. While we can provide basic language facilities in French and Spanish we should bear in mind that we will be attracting a different cohort from Asian countries and areas where we currently lack language skills. We must invest to ensure we have all the services and facilities that would be important in that context. From the point of view of the economy we hope that the funding for marketing will continue to be provided as an investment in tourism. If it is not then the industry will fall apart.

Integrated ticketing in Dublin has been raised on more than one occasion. My colleague, Deputy Tommy Broughan, who is the party spokesman on transport, has raised it many times. We cannot hang about much longer. We keep being told it is going to happen. Integrated ticketing is something one takes for granted in any European city. It would not be an issue elsewhere.

There will be a huge spin-off from any international conference, not just for the immediate area in which it takes place. Will the Minister indicate what is the current status of the application for the hotel facility, how important it is, whether there is a need for it and if the matter is being progressed?

The purpose of the Bill is to ensure the provision of alcohol within the convention centre. That provides an opportunity for me to express concern with how we in this country deal with alcohol in a wider context. The legislation is positive in the context of providing a facility that is essential to the convention centre but we need to look carefully at the wider issue of alcohol. A number of Bills are on the list of current legislative proposals and we need to deal with them. Overall, I welcome the proposal. I hope we have a very successful international and national support for the convention centre.

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