Tourism industry - Government has shown scant regard

The Irish tourist industry is in crisis, as a result of a decline of almost one million visitors and €900m in tourist revenue during 2009.

The tourist industry is wailing about its problems, calling for Government help, which is undoubtedly needed, but everyone should recognise that, by overpricing itself, the industry has wrung the neck of the goose that laid the golden eggs.

The 12% decline in the number of overseas visitors last year was compounded by a reduction of 5% in domestic trips, which led to a further revenue loss of 9%. Those figures would suggest that domestic holiday-makers actually spend more money. Therein lays part of the problem. Foreign tourists were attracted to this country with holiday packages that contained price offers that were generally not available to domestic holiday-makers. Many Irish people found it much cheaper to vacation on the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, the Canaries, or even as far away as Turkey.

Half of the foreign visitors to this country normally came from Britain, but there was a precipitate decline in their numbers during the past couple of years. British visitors dropped by 10% in 2008 and by a further 16% in 2009. At the same time the number of visitors from mainland Europe, which constitutes this country’s second biggest visitor market, dropped by 9%, while visitors from North America were down by 6%. As a consequence of these declines, the sector is now largely dependent on the Irish market, with two-thirds of the hotel bed-nights coming from the Republic. The occupancy rate is now only about 55% and this applies throughout the country.

Over the decades since the late 1950s when this country first recognised the potential earnings of the tourist industry, there were persistent calls for more hotels and more beds. Now we are being told that there are too many hotels. Some hotels have been offering overnight rates that others find uneconomical, because they have high repayments. This is part of the consequence of the collapse of the property boom. With imaginative measures it should be possible to revitalise the industry and make an Irish holiday attractive not only to foreign visitors but also to the domestic market. We had been pricing ourselves out of the tourist market. If Irish people found it too expensive to holiday here, why would anyone else be interested?

In the 1980s the Government provided leadership by setting ambitious targets for tourism, primarily in the interest of generating jobs. But the current Government has essentially ignored these problems. Tourism has been treated as little more than a joke, by being downgraded to that what has sometimes been ridiculed as Ministry for Fun, under the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism. Last July the McCarthy Report recommended the very existence of the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism should be examined. Over six months later the Government has prevaricated with little more than empty talk. This shows scant concern for the tourist industry and even less for the hundreds of thousands of jobs dependent on that industry.