Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We can all see the successes that there were when I talk about Brigid 1500, whether it was in County Kildare or whether I am talking about County Louth and, as I said, Dundalk and Faughart. Tourism Ireland needs to play a far bigger role with regard to more joined-up thinking. None of us wants to get into a spat, and we have seen that from time to time. People in the general north Louth area got really annoyed when they heard RTÉ talking about Kildare being the birthplace of St. Brigid, or at least that is what they believe they heard anyway. We need to deal with that. Tourism Ireland needs to make sure that it is hands-on.

We have a really good starting point. There was spectacular work done by Dundalk Bids and by Martin McElligott and his team and we need to build on it. On some level, we are probably getting sometimes even greater international notice than domestic notice, outside of the people of Dundalk and north County Louth, who are very happy. Even those who would have said they were not quite sure on this said it was an absolutely fabulous event that took a huge amount of people over that period into the town of Dundalk. As I said, it was both spectacular and enjoyable, and very positive. Sometimes we do not have a huge level of positivity out there so it is something we can build on.

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