Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I thank all the Members who have contributed to the debate. In particular, I express my appreciation of the work of my colleague, Deputy Mary Upton, not only in presenting this motion to the House, but in presenting and publishing an outstanding policy document for the Labour Party in this important area of tourism.

I am disappointed my constituency colleague, the Minister, Deputy Hanafin, has not accepted the motion we tabled. I would have expected the motion from the Labour Party to have been of assistance to her in fighting her corner for the tourism industry and its importance, especially at this time of the year.

The motion is about jobs and getting people back to work. Unlike the Government, the Labour Party does not believe it is possible to cut one's way out of a recession. One cannot sink €22 billion into a zombie bank, such as Anglo Irish Bank, and expect such an approach to steer one out of recession. The Labour Party has been consistent from the beginning. The only way to get out of this recession is if we work our way out of it. What is more, the people want to work their way out of it.

Through its recklessness and privileging of vested interests before the national interest, this Fianna Fáil Government precipitated our economic disaster. We were the first into recession and we will be the last out of it. It will be deeper and our debts greater because of the mistakes it made and its mismanagement.

However, this economic disaster is also a human disaster. The hundreds of thousands of families and individuals affected by unemployment during this recession will be scarred, perhaps for years to come. At present, there are 439,000 people on the live register, unemployed or under-employed. The most recent quarterly national household survey shows that 41% of all people unemployed have been out of work for more than one year. One in every three young men in the labour force is out of work. More than 1,400 businesses went to the wall last year.

The Labour Party first began discussing job creation, through investment in a school building programme and the retraining of construction workers in summer 2008, before the banking collapse. Since then, we have proposed a series of practical measures to create jobs in our economy and to head off the emergence of long-term unemployment through training, work placement and work sharing schemes. One such measure is a €1.15 billion jobs fund comprising three pillars: funding for infrastructure projects which are ready to go, such as school renovation, urban regeneration and flood reliefs that will create jobs and useful, lasting resources; up to 60,000 new education and training places that reflect our future skills needs, including 30,000 graduate and apprentice work placements; and investment for sectoral job strategies in green energy, tourism, agrifood, creative industries and other areas where we already have a competitive advantage.

We have also proposed a PRSI holiday for employers who create new jobs that are filled by people who have been on the live register for six months or more. We proposed this in April 2009. Last week, the Government announced with much fanfare that it was finally adopting the same idea. We proposed a new law to ban upward-only rent reviews for new and existing commercial leases to save jobs and viable businesses in the retail sector. The Government voted down our proposed legislation. We proposed a State investment bank that would provide investment capital for new start-ups and to expand existing, home-grown industries. All of these ideas have been costed. We believe they are affordable and that we cannot afford to do nothing. Every person on the dole for a year costs the Exchequer €20,000 in welfare benefits and lost taxes. That money would be better invested in getting such a person back into sustainable employment.

The Labour Party's latest policy blueprint for the tourism industry, published by Deputy Upton, contains 29 practical suggestions for sustaining and growing one of our most important sectors. Some 15 of these ideas are put forward in this motion. These include the abolition or reduction of the travel tax, which arguably costs more in lost tourism revenue than it raises; protection of the tourism marketing budget as a key instrument in developing new tourism markets, for example, in Asia; and a strategy to deal with the phenomenon of zombie hotels, which had been encouraged as a tax avoidance mechanism by the Fianna Fáil Government.

As my Labour Party colleague, Deputy Mary Upton, highlighted, the tourism sector in Ireland is a major employer. In 2009, the tourism industry employed almost 120,000 people and contributed €1.2 billion in tax revenues. It is a truly national industry, employing people in every corner of the country across a range of age and skill levels. What is more, we are aware that we have a good tourism product. Despite the fall in tourism numbers in recent years, tourism has been a domestic success story underpinned by small businesses and entrepreneurs.

One point often missed in high-flown lip-service paid to the smart economy is that a smarter economy has to stretch from the grassroots up as well as from cloud computing down. The Labour Party's policy blueprint highlights several ways in which we can improve the delivery and marketing of our tourism product through mobile applications, better integration of services on the web, specific web portals for popular activities in Ireland, such as surfing or golf, and better penetration of broadband such that rural businesses can take full advantage of the Internet.

We welcome the Government's statements on the smart economy and green technology but thus far statements are all we have got. While this Government is highlighting what it will do, it is ignoring the economic winners we have on our own doorstep. This is why the Labour Party has been advocating sectoral job strategies which consider how we can expand existing, successful industries, such as tourism and food and culture. Ireland has great potential in emerging industries, such as cleantech. The Labour Party has put forward a strategy in our 2009 policy document, The Energy Revolution. However, it will take time to grow these new, high-tech sectors, some of which are still in their infancy. In contrast, we can create the conditions to grow established, nationwide industries relatively quickly.

Tourism, for example, does not require further expensive infrastructure or lengthy lead-in times. It takes advantage of skills which our labour force already has well honed, such as customer service, food production and information technology skills, to name but a few. If we do this right, it is a sustainable source of jobs, both environmentally and in its longevity. If we steward our tourism industry well, it will prove to be an immensely valuable renewable resource.

No one in the House believes repairing our economy will be easy. However, it will be impossible if we do not staunch the loss of jobs throughout our economy and if we do not take urgent measures to prevent mass long-term unemployment. That is the critical purpose of this motion and I call on every Deputy on the Government benches to consider carefully his or her response to the Labour Party's positive, job-focused proposals on the tourism industry.

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