This weekend's CSO figures on visitors to this country have cast a serious doubt over our once glorious tourism sector. The figures show a drop of 20% in the number of visitors in January and 30% in February. Visitor spending has dropped 31% in those two months compared to last year and overnight bed bookings are down 33%. This is a concern for cities like Dublin, Galway, Cork, Waterford and others but it is also a disaster for rural communities like west Cork, Kerry, Connemara, other areas and more if this trend continues.

The reasons given are cost of staying in Ireland, cost of food spiralling out of control and the low availability of hotel space, as many of our traditional hotels are now IPAS centres. This is not a dip. It is a collapse unless measures are immediately put in place to counteract this drop, such as a decrease in the VAT rate from 13.5% to 9% and the freeing up of hotels throughout the country. What are the Government's plans to counteract this huge fall in the tourism sector numbers?

More and more hotels are decanting in respect of IPAS and the beneficiaries of temporary protection, BOTPs, over the last while. Obviously, we will do everything we possibly can to increase numbers. There are significant issues globally in terms of confidence in the world economy - that may be a factor playing out - but again, it is early days yet to be writing off the tourism industry. Our tourism industry is very resilient and very robust. We have a very good product. We have some very big events coming that will swell the numbers, give us a good start to the spring. Hopefully, we can improve on those numbers. I will ask the Minister for tourism to engage with the Deputy on the matter.