Tourism is a €9.5bn industry, not just a bit of fun

A favoured cliché in dead-end discussions around Irish policymaking is, no matter what the problem is, to suggest that it needs its own minister or department. That will solve everything, right?

Over the last few years we have heard numerous calls for a Minister for Brexit. During Covid apparently we needed a Minister for Testing at one point, and then a Minister for Vaccines. There are regular calls for a Minister for Women (while in Britain this week, Tory MP Nick Fletcher called for a Minister for Men). A Minister for Poverty, Minister for Domestic Violence, Minister for the Internet, and so on ...

These calls are often well-meaning and, occasionally, credible. But more often it is a sign of dull thinking. Usually what is required to make progress on sticky issues is a coherent and well-thought-out policy response, not a figurehead to shout at and blame. However, sometimes it becomes clear that a shake-up in political leadership is required to bring coherence to the policy response around a particular issue.

The last few weeks of the unbridled chaos that has ripped through all elements of the travel and tourism industries comes on top of more than two years of dire strategic thinking about the sector during the pandemic. These things are interlinked. One has led in large part to the other.

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It is hard to fathom why the tourism and travel sector, given its vast economic scale and clear strategic importance to this State, is spread across two separate ministries in the government. Even then it remains only a bit part of each of those ministers’ bulging bag of responsibilities.

A painful lesson that was relearned over the last two years, and which the public is reabsorbing to its chagrin in the current chaos at Dublin Airport, is that access to transport is the key to making the whole tourism industry work. And for an island like ours that really means access to aviation. There is no rational explanation for why tourism and transport (in the form of aviation) are considered two separate portfolios in Irish government.

Eamon Ryan is the Minister for Transport, as some people realised this week after he requested from the Minister of Defence that the Army be put on standby to help out at Dublin Airport. Separately, he holds a second daunting portfolio as the Minister for Climate, Environment and Communications. Technically, transport is 25 per cent of his responsibilities – maybe all of Monday plus a bit of Tuesday morning in his working week. Maybe he gets an entire afternoon out of aviation.

Meanwhile his fellow Green Party member and acute political rival Catherine Martin is the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media. There is possibly a bare screed of logic in placing tourism in with culture and the arts as these are things that some tourists like to experience while they’re in Ireland. But other than that her portfolio looks like a plate of leftovers.

Martin seems a reasonably competent politician and she was on to a winner during the pandemic when all she had to do was throw around public money as compensation for Covid closures, and forget about strategy. But now she is ostensibly the main Minister for the tourism industry’s development and that can be observed by the fact that she is the one to whom the tourism agencies, Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland, genuflect. Her department is devising the State’s new multiyear tourism strategy.

Yet how can a Minister lead the development of a coherent national policy framework for a sector as large as tourism when the most important subset of that sector, transport and aviation, is entirely in the hands of a different political leader?

It doesn’t make sense. It is like developing a strategy for the food industry without agriculture – aviation is the fundamental delivery pipe for the entire tourism industry. It wouldn’t be so bad if Martin and Ryan were joined at the hip and you could be confident they shared thinking. But she has been snapping at his heels for the Green Party leadership for three years. Their political bases despise each other.

Look at how responsibility for the tourism industry has been bounced around different departments over the years. In the 1980s it was part of the Department of the Marine, perhaps because we were so reliant on ferries at the time. In 1987 it was transferred into the Department of Transport. Six years later it was shipped out to the department that corresponds roughly to the one now run by Martin. In 2011, when it was realised that tourism was the key to ending the economic crisis, it was brought back into Transport. In 2020 it was carved out again and sent back to Culture.

It is emblematic of the official Irish attitude to the travel and tourism industries. Having formally studied the sector, worked in it, and written about it for many years, I have never shaken off the view that the industry is just not taken all that seriously in the Irish establishment. It isn’t viewed seriously by economists, politicians or the people who run the media. When industry lobbyists say this, they are often dismissed as vain vested interests. However, I happen to believe they are correct in their view.

The apathy is often reflected in how the sector is covered in the press. Tourism usually only hits the headlines when people are thinking about going on their summer holidays. Then it becomes a national obsession for a few weeks. If people are prevented from going on their holidays, as many are by the current chaos, the obsession cranks up a notch. But it always dies down once the real news season begins again. Sober, measured analysis of the sector is rarely seen as a sexy story. Travel chaos is.

When some people regularly pointed out during the pandemic that the clumsy and strategy-free Irish policy approach being adopted towards the travel industry (especially aviation) would lead to operational scarring for years to come, they were not listened to enough. Having a single, unified, important voice sitting at the Cabinet table might have helped.

Tourism is important. Before the pandemic it employed about 260,000 people and was worth €9.5 billion, according to officials. It generated €7.4 billion in foreign exchange earnings, one of the State’s most lucrative industries. It represented about 3.6 per cent of Gross National Product, in the same ballpark as agriculture.

Tourism and travel will be at the heart of policy debates around climate change, economic and regional development for years to some. It needs one political voice.

Like Paschal Donohoe, Leo Varadkar is himself a former minister for transport and tourism. When he retakes the position of Taoiseach later this year he should stick tourism back into the transport department where it belongs. And woe betide any political leader who is foolish enough to move it again.