Michael Conaghan (Dublin South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I commend the Minister of State on his hard work in the Department. It is work that is being rewarded and noted across the country, particularly in the area of tourism where there has been a significant return to growth under his stewardship. This revival is positive. It is not confined to one place, one town, one city or one region, it is very diverse. That is one of the characteristics of the current revival. Every district is experiencing the return of tourists. My sister in Donegal, who is familiar with the remoter parts of the county, told me the other day that the tourists are back. This is welcome in our part of the country.

We need to evaluate and develop new tourism products at macro level. Historically, there has been an over-reliance on landscape and literature in the context of attracting tourists to Ireland. We must diversify in a radical way and develop new tourism products and projects. In that context, I suggest the development of industrial heritage tourism, an area which has been severely neglected to date. That fact was borne out for me dramatically when I recently visited the Workshops Rail Museum in Ipswich, a suburb just outside Brisbane, Australia. There they have all the great engines and rail technology with men working in a real live workshop with a museum alongside it. We could not get in the first day we visited it because of the queues and had to go back the next morning. There one can see all the old decorative carriages used to transport kings and queens, along with the entire range of rail technology, tools, etc. There are men who have worked there for years, demonstrating how one can take lumps of stone and turn them into molten lava to shape materials in the making and restoration of rail engines. Children watch this wide-eyed with schools queueing up for these direct experiences of technology and manufacturing. There are also trips on the old trains. It was a very enjoyable experience and the type of tourism project we should be considering.

While I was there, one of the men working there asked me, because I come from Ireland, if I had heard of the Inchicore railway works. I said I had because I live only five minutes from them. He said the Inchicore railway works was the daddy of them all. It was one of the great engineering complexes on this island, founded in the middle of the 19th century. It has a great repository of skills and achievements, along with great output and feats of engineering and design. Trains and carriages have gone all over the world from those works.

When we are looking at new categories of tourism development, it would be appropriate that we might take a leaf out of the book of the Workshops Rail Museum in Ipswich, Brisbane, and see how that could be replicated in Inchicore. The Inchicore railway works is on an 80 acre site with rows and rows of old buildings that are no longer used. The staff at the works are keen to see such a development because, on their own, they cannot conserve and care for old engines and carriages properly because there are not enough resources going into it. While railway museums are commonplace in the UK, we have neglected our industrial heritage. This shows disrespect and a disregard for the skills, work and output of ordinary people across hundreds of years. We are very good with our literature and our landscape but we must not forget the great output of ordinary people in manufacturing, probably best exemplified in places like the Inchicore railway works.

Will the Minister of State consider getting behind the Inchicore railway works, the local community and the local heritage groups who have been developing many projects in the area such as the Royal Hospital, the memorial park and other clusters of tourism attractions? Perhaps he might visit the railway works and see how a railway museum, which would be a fitting tribute to the achievements of that area, could be considered and developed over time. This is a project which would break new ground and diversify our cultural tourism products. We need to be innovative. We have developed and exploited the tourism potential of our landscape and literature but we must diversify into new tourism projects. The Minister of State has shown that he is not afraid to break new ground. I hope he will visit the railway works at Inchicore and break new ground in industrial heritage tourism by developing a railway museum at the site.

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