Christopher O'Sullivan (Cork South West, Fianna Fail)
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354. To ask the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht if she will consider producing a five-year plan with the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment for the hospitality sector with a road to recovery after Covid-19; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [13429/21]

Catherine Martin (Dublin Rathdown, Green Party)
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As Minister with responsibility for tourism, I am aware that many of our hospitality businesses are dependent on both domestic and inbound tourism for business. Together with the Tánaiste, I jointly chair a Hospitality and Tourism Forum which allows us both to monitor developments in these sectors.

The challenges facing tourism as a result of the pandemic are hugely significant. All tourism activity is affected when businesses cannot open and people cannot travel due to the necessary public health measures introduced. In Ireland, the impact is even greater due to the fact that we are heavily reliant on inbound overseas tourism for approximately three-quarters of all revenue generated and this sector is even more adversely affected by the pandemic.

A Tourism Recovery Taskforce was appointed last May to prepare a Tourism Recovery Plan which includes a set of recommendations on how best the Irish Tourism sector can adapt and recover in a changed tourism environment as a result of the crisis. The Taskforce presented the Tourism Recovery Plan 2020–2023 to me on September 30th last. The Plan makes a number of recommendations to help tourism businesses to survive, stabilise and recover from the COVID pandemic. This Plan has been a very useful input for me as I have considered, along with my Government colleagues, measures to help the tourism sector to survive the effects of the pandemic and, in time, to recover. The Plan has informed many of the measures we have introduced.

In December, I appointed a Recovery Oversight Group to oversee the implementation of the Recovery Plan and monitor the recovery of the tourism sector. This Group reported to me for the first time last month and I brought this report to the attention of my colleagues in Cabinet. This report welcomed progress made to date and set out a number of areas on which the Oversight Group believes the Government should focus.

I will continue to use the Tourism Recovery Plan and the outputs from the Recovery Oversight Group to inform my thinking as the situation evolves. Overall, a recovery in tourism activity will serve to help all of those businesses which depend on tourism to generate revenue.