Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As the House is well aware, Covid-19 as an infectious disease is reasonably well under control in Ireland and fairly well under control across Europe. There are still some outstanding issues in other countries. As a result, we see our tourism industry beginning to recover and there is no doubt that scheduled flights are very much back on track, with passenger numbers increasing. I am thankful the frequency of flights is starting to recover. This is all really positive for a major dimension of our domestic economy, namely, tourism and the hosting of international tourists.

I will speak, however, to what can only be described as price-gouging and an outrageous approach to pricing that is taking place in the hotel sector, particularly here in Dublin. People had mentioned this to me so I did a small bit of analysis in the office before coming here and the numbers bear this out.

A hotel room for two nights, Friday and Saturday, next weekend comes to over €700 for two people in a four star hotel in this city. I did some comparisons and in Berlin the same stay would cost approximately €300 and in Paris it would be approximately €450. In London it would cost €500 and in Lisbon it would cost €300. In 2019, the average price for a room in Dublin was approximately €150 per night.That would be €300 or €350 at weekends, so during the space of the pandemic, the price has doubled.

I understand the hospitality sector has taken a very significant battering over the period of the pandemic but the hotel sector succeeded and survived with the support of the citizens of the State because, on behalf of the Irish people, the Government invested very significant amounts of money in the sector. The hospitality sector received about €1.6 billion in the employment wage subsidy scheme, which was 29% of all payments. A total of €717 million was provided under the Covid-19 restrictions support scheme while the figure for debt warehousing was €2.9 billion. Not all of that went to the hospitality sector but it certainly contributed to the survival of those businesses. I know these businesses need to recover but they cannot expect to recoup all their losses in the course of a year because that approach will damage our image internationally. As I said, the price of a weekend stay here is nearly twice that of our main competitors across Europe when we take in Berlin, Paris, London and Lisbon. There is something wrong there.

Perhaps the Deputy Leader would arrange a debate on tourism and the obvious threats to our tourism product development. We can thrash it out and, it is hoped, get the views of the Minister as to how we might approach this issue.