Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I come from Galway, which is the tourism heaven of Ireland. Some time ago, when driving to Cork, I passed 15 trucks belonging to one of the main haulage companies in the country. It is a game of mine, whenever I travel anywhere, to count the number of times I pass one of these trucks. I cannot understand why Irish Rail has not established regional hubs from which these trucks could feed out to the local community, thereby reducing the cost of rail travel for the consumer. The Minister might examine this.

We have some of the finest hotels in the world. Over the past few years, in my former role as president of a union, I have been privileged to travel all over the world. One of the issues that annoys me intensely is the way many of our hotels that have been taken over by NAMA are allowing their assets to deteriorate. In some of the finest hotels in Ireland there is paint peeling off the wall and poor and dirty furniture. We can do much better. I recently booked into two hotels and when I got into bed I thought I was getting into a water bed. They were so damp it was not funny. I will not name the counties because I do not want people to guess where I am talking about. We need to improve on this. I do not necessarily subscribe to the notion that we rip people off. In any country I have visited at any time when there has been a conference, hotel prices naturally increase. However, we need to do something about how competitive they are with respect to those prices.

Family tourism is very important, and I wonder why we have not been able to come up with a single price ticket that covers such things as hop-on-hop-off transportation around the entire country, as well as access to cultural and heritage sites. While one can buy a single ticket for heritage and cultural sites, if we could add transport, families coming here could budget for this aspect of their holiday and would not need to fear additional costs.

Although it is not specifically the Minister's area, I am concerned about the loss of €600,000 in funding to the non-Irish-speaking islands. Islands such as Inisbofin draw large numbers of tourists to the country, and if local development companies close down due to a lack of funding, it will be detrimental. The Minister could step in and do something about it. In 2007 funding was at €7.7 million, but in 2010 it dropped to €5.9 million. The Minister is on the upward slope again at €7 million - fair play to him for that - and he could throw another €600,000 on that and give it back to the islands, which would, perhaps, allow tourism to grow there. I commend the Minister on the work he is doing and on keeping the regional airports open. I wish him well in his Ministry. If there is a peach of a job in government, he has it.