Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We were all pleased to see that the American market opened up yesterday. It is great news for family members who will be able to travel to America for the first time in 18 months to meet their loved ones. Some grandparents have not seen their grandchildren and so on. It is a great news story. The positivity from New York struck me. New York, as a city, is going to be running the most aggressive marketing campaign in its history. It will be spending more money than it ever has before on marketing its city internationally. That brings to me to the question of tourism in this country. We, as a country, should now be spending more than we ever have before to market our country internationally.

With that in mind, I ask the Leader to request a debate on tourism and its marketing. When 9/11 happened, the managing director of Dromoland Castle Hotel in County Clare had a board meeting and the board decided instantaneously to move all of its marketing budget from America, from where it got massive revenue over the years, to Europe. Doing this saved the business. It kept the hotel going, kept people employed and kept the rooms filled. That was an example of an organisation acting in a flexible way. We need a massive marketing budget to rebound tourism in this country. We need to put together The Gathering and the Wild Atlantic Way into one enormous marketing budget. We need to be flexible in terms of how we go about it. A debate on that matter would be very useful. What did we learn during the most recent recession in 2011, 2012 and 2013? What was the first industry that really got going? It was tourism. It created a great feel-good factor and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Tourism can have the same effect post pandemic.