Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I need to put Senator Paddy Burke straight. I welcome the Minister of State to the House and I hope he is in better form than his colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donovan, when he appeared before us a couple of weeks ago.

I need to address what Senator Paddy Burke said regarding VAT on hotel beds. We need to be very clear about this because it is important to get accurate information. Certainly we would abolish the 9% VAT rate on hotel beds only and not on restaurants or bars. The reason we would do this is we all know massive price gouging goes on, in Dublin in particular, on hotel rooms. There is not a hotel bed to be got in the place and the prices escalate and escalate. We ask whether the €190 million would not be better used to invest in housing and perhaps in the children who must go to school from hotels and go home to whatever hotel their parents stay in that night, that is if they are lucky enough to have a bed. Part of this €190 million is given to people who are price gouging and who are multimillionaires. I will make no apologies for that whatsoever.