Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)

During 2009, Fáilte Ireland provided a range of training and business supports directly to almost 3,000 individual tourism businesses and, in 2010, it will invest more than €11 million in direct supports and advice for tourism enterprises.

I thank the House again for the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I am pleased the House continues to take an active interest in tourism, perhaps our longest-standing and most important internationally-traded service industry. We all recognise that these are extraordinarily challenging and difficult times for every economic sector and tourism is not immune. However, drawing on the report of the tourism renewal group and with the correct foundations, including a robust and recently renewed strategic and policy framework, strong partnership between the public and private sectors, effective State agencies, appropriate investment in marketing and product and tourism enterprises which are now on a par with those anywhere in the world in terms of management capacity and quality, I am confident our industry will rise to this challenge and that it can position itself to come out of this downturn even stronger than before.