Óna Máire Walsh

So we can't take it for granted and we have to grow it.

Yeah, so the government, so I think just backing up the truck a little bit, tourism in the current government was moved into the Department of Enterprise.

And we welcome that strongly because all the big... So under Peter Burke.

Under Peter Burke, exactly, along with enterprise tourism and employment.

All the big issues relating to tourism, whether it's cost of business, whether it's competitiveness, whether it's the Dublin Airport cap, whether it's the VAT rate.

You know, they all have economic issues at their core.

So we welcome that.

We had lobbied quite hard for it.

And the government and Minister Burke published a five-year national policy for tourism just last December.

So a policy out to 2031.

And it had very laudable, ambitious goals, which the Irish tourism industry is very supportive of.

One of them is growing revenue, as you say, by 50% after 2031.

However, if you sort of do the number crunching, it's evidence that Irish tourism doesn't have enough bedstock, tourism bedstock, to actually accommodate that plus 50% number.

So I was arguing in that Irish Times piece that you referenced that regional Ireland in particular has a very small pipeline of new hotel construction or hotel extensions.

Why?

There's market failure in regional Ireland.

So investors are looking at regional Ireland and going, there's not a return on investment, construction costs are too high, planning delays, and they just don't see the return on investment.

So I was arguing that if we want to see tourism grow by plus 7%, I think is the government target, per annum into regional Ireland, we need to pull some policy levers to stimulate supply.

So there is investment taking place.

There is bits of investment around the country.