Ciarán Cannon (Fine Gael)

I ask the Leader for an immediate and urgent debate on the tourism sector, a sector in which he has much experience. The sector is dying on its feet following a €1 billion drop in revenue since 2007. There has been a catastrophic drop in the number of people coming from Britain, which has reduced by 30% since 2008. There are now 75,000 fewer seats each week on planes coming into this country than there were two years ago. This disaster cannot be totally attributed to the global downturn because even though our visitor numbers fell by 12% last year, Britain with a similar climate managed to increase its visitor numbers by 4.6%. The only response from the Government has been a heart-sinking knee-jerk reaction of committees and taskforces. When it set up a tourism renewal group, it chose to ignore that group's advice to remove the travel tax immediately. We now have the renewal implementation group which was set up to implement the recommendations of the tourism renewal group. Meanwhile numbers are dropping on a daily basis. We need some innovative thinking and a new approach. The first thing we need to do is to call Michael O'Leary's and Christoph Mueller's bluff. As they claim the air travel tax is an impediment to growth in the tourism sector, let us scrap the tax for two years and challenge them to produce the numbers they claim they can bring to this country on their planes every year.

We should kick off the 2011 tourism season with an innovative approach. The budget for tourism promotion each year is €155 million of taxpayers' money. We should take €10 million of that and have an auction across all the airlines serving this country and buy 100,000 free seats into Ireland to kick off next year's tourism campaign. On average each tourist to this country spends approximately €600 here and we would reclaim that money in VAT alone. We need to offer a genuine céad míle fáilte to all our neighbours in the EU indicating that Ireland is open for business at the beginning of the next season. We need to be the land of 100,000 welcomes - a reputation we have always had and which should stand in the future.