Catherine Noone (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate Senator White and all those involved. It is a great development and well done to her on her efforts. The One Young World Summit will be launched in Dublin later. It is a conference comprising more than 1,500 young people from around the world with representatives from 190 countries. World leaders such as Kofi Annan will address delegates. The conference is worth approximately €2 million to the local economy. Dublin has such conferences regularly because it is seen as a global leader in conference hosting. The Dublin Convention Bureau deserves credit for its work in this regard. We need to work more consciously on this and to promote other areas in the west, south and the midlands as venues for conferences. We can compete with the best in the world when it comes to conferences, and the launch of the One Young World Summit tonight will prove that. I seek a debate on tourism and conference hosting. It is linked, similar to the job creation debate we had a year ago, to exploring what measures we could undertake to bolster our increasing tourism numbers throughout the country and to attract more conferences.