Martin enters Kenny country promising tourism revival

MICHEÁL MARTIN swept through Enda Kenny’s heartland promising to revive the tourism industry if he successfully thwarts the Fine Gael leader’s bid to become taoiseach.

The tourism and hospitality sector in the north-west has struggled and this worsened because of Government cutbacks.

However, Mr Martin said if returned to office he would deliver one million extra visitors to Ireland by 2015 and this would result in an extra 15,000 jobs.

He launched Fianna Fáil’s tourism policy at the Ice House hotel outside Ballina in a county where the economy has taken a hit because of depressed visitor figures and oversupply in the hotel sector.

Two Mayo hotels have closed since Christmas and at least two more are in acute difficulty.

Mr Martin rejected the suggestion the continuance of tax reliefs for the hotel sector under the Fianna Fáil-led governments compounded the problems.

He said the blame for those tax reliefs went back to before 1997. And he said in the short-term there could be no rescue for struggling hotels because only a recovery in tourism figures would solve the problem.

“[Attracting visitors] is the only way really, realistically in the medium term, that we can meet the difficulties in the hotel sector and indeed other areas of the hospitality sector,” he said.

Mr Martin also defended the Government’s policy towards airline access to regional airports, including the recent decision to scrap public service obligation contracts for periphery routes.

The loss of this support has hit the ability of Sligo and Knock airports to finance themselves.

Ireland West Airport [Knock] said it invested €26m in its facilities in the past seven years and the loss of the PSO will hit the local tourism and business economy.

Mr Martin said these decisions and the imposition of the travel tax, which was lowered in the last budget, had to be viewed in the context of the wider economy.

He said lower passenger figures was not the fault of the travel tax because the onus was on theairports to lower their cost base.

Launching the strategy he was flanked by senator, and candidate for Sligo north Leitrim, Marc MacSharry, junior minister Dara Calleary and Mayo candidate Lisa Chambers.

Mr MacSharry said the inability to retain the PSO for the airports was “hugely” disappointing.

However, he said if it could not be retained other policies were needed to market the area and boost its competitiveness.

After Ballina, Mr Martin and his motorcade travelled to Claremorris to boost the campaign of debut candidate Ms Chambers, whose supporters recognised she had a difficult battle to retain the seat held by Beverly Flynn.

Down the road at the McWilliam Park Hotel general manager Fergal Ryan, and Mayo’s Irish Hotel Federation representative, said the election had come at the worst time for the hospitality sector in the region.

Hotels, he said, generally worked off credit and overdrafts during the winter months and caught up when the tourist season picked up. However, this required the availability of credit from the banks and a good Christmas period to boost December cash flows.

The blizzard-like conditions before and after Christmas hobbled this business model and the reluctance of the banks to lend brought the situation to a critical point.

“In the winter you use the overdraft facility and pay as many bills as you can but what is vital is a good winter period and an overdraft… we need something done in the next six to eight weeks in particular.”

He said the over-supply issue could not simply be dealt with by waiting for hotels to shut down and an effort was needed to make it easier to fly into from Britain, France and Germany in particular.