Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael)

I call for a very urgent and necessary debate on the tourism industry. It has been accepted wisdom for a number of years that the one industry in Ireland that we could depend on to continue sustaining and increasing jobs was tourism. We have all the right ingredients for a tourism industry and I do not propose to go through them. The debate is particularly urgent in light of the fact that we had 1 million fewer visitors last year than previously. There are a number of obvious contributing factors to that but one that we cannot deny is the airport tax. It was a mistake to introduce the extra airport tax.