Maria Byrne (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the fact that there are over 200,000 people in employment to do with tourism. I agree with colleagues in respect of some of the abuse of the 9% VAT rate. Many cities, towns and rural areas are not abusing the system and find it very useful in terms of employment. However, certainly in Dublin it needs to be monitored. I am volunteering this weekend in Dublin with Special Olympics Ireland. I looked for a rate in a few of the hotels and I would not like to tell colleagues some of the quotes I was given. We are going to outprice ourselves in the tourism sector.

The Wild Atlantic Way has been mentioned a lot. Back in 2006, we also launched the Shannon Estuary drive and the Burren drive but we do not hear very much about them nowadays. They were links to try to encourage inward tourism attractions off the Wild Atlantic Way to benefit places like Ennis and Limerick. We have had increased numbers in King John’s Castle. When the current Taoiseach was Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport he put a lot of investment into the castle, which had not received investment for many years. They did a fantastic job renovating it and numbers have trebled there, which is to be welcomed. We need to look at niche things like the Shannon Estuary drive and the Burren drive in terms of linking up the bigger projects. Those initiatives for inward tourism links need to be looked at by the Minister of State’s Department and linked with Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland.

There was another initiative where visitors were given a passport and with every 20 tourism attractions they visited, there was a draw for something like an overnight stay in a hotel along one of the routes. That was launched as an incentive to get people to visit our heritage sites. A lot of people do not appreciate what they have on their own doorsteps and have not gone to visit some of those sites. It would be good if we had an incentive to encourage people at the weekends, during the summer time or whatever to visit heritage sites and tourism attractions. The OPW introduced free entry for children to its heritage sites at one stage, which I compliment. I would encourage many tourism attractions to give free admittance to children under ten. It can work out quite expensive to visit an attraction with a big family.

Skills shortages is an issue dear to my heart and I have raised it on many occasions in this House. Some of my colleagues have stated that there needs to be more joined-up thinking between education and tourism in terms of the creation of chef positions and so on. The issue of the licence also needs to be looked at. For non-Irish chefs, they have to bring a uniqueness to get a permit to work here but they are not considered to be unique. There is a huge shortage of chefs and we need Department officials in the areas of jobs, trade, tourism and education to come together to examine initiatives enabling people to go out and work. There is no point in us bringing tourists in if we cannot give them the level of service they require.

I compliment the Minister of State. He has hit the ground running and is very much on top of his brief. I encourage him to consider initiatives to encourage the smaller routes as well as the main routes.