Brendan Griffin (Kerry, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Naughton for raising this matter and I appreciate her interest in tourism in Galway. I was glad to recently join her and the Minister of State, Deputy Kyne, on a tour of her constituency of Galway West to deal with a number of tourism and sport-related matters.

I thank her for her interest in the Wonders of the Wild Atlantic Way campaign. It is a new €1.8 million initiative to highlight the ease of access to the Wild Atlantic Way from six gateway cities in the UK, namely, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and London. The six arrival airports along the western seaboard are Cork, Kerry, Shannon, Donegal, City of Derry and Ireland West Airport, Knock. I have been working on this initiative with Tourism Ireland and Fáilte Ireland since assuming office and have made several trips to London to work with Tourism Ireland to develop the campaign. We are pleased to say that the campaign has been launched and is operational and will target 10 million Britons who will be reminded in a very vivid way of how close to them the Wild Atlantic Way is. The selected airports are all within two hours of the Wild Atlantic Way and we are using a number of high visibility outdoor advertising media such as billboards to highlight its proximity to those cities.

We are very keen to reverse the fall in visitor numbers from the UK to Ireland since the Brexit vote in June 2016 and this campaign will produce results. It will also help boost visitor numbers during off-peak times outside the traditional tourist seasons, which is a key challenge for many areas, in particular the peripheral parts of the country. There is a great focus on regionality and seasonality in the initiative and I hope it will produce tangible results for places such as the Galway West constituency and the entire western seaboard.

See this speech in context