When Shane Ross was minister for tourism in the last government, his relationship with the industry's representatives was as cool as an Atlantic breeze. They always expressed a sense that he just did not "get" the sector and privately they would rail that he rarely fought for it at the Cabinet table.
He was barely four months in the job when he gave a speech in front of industry leaders that stupidly dismissed tourism as the “third leg” of his portfolio, which also included transport and sport. A leg is attached to a foot and Ross had just used his to kick his own face. His failure to prevent a hike in tourism VAT from 9 to 13.5 per cent in Budget 2019 left him as a lame duck in the industry’s eyes.
Former teacher Catherine Martin, Ross's successor in the tourism portfolio (albeit with culture and arts instead of its natural bedfellow, transport), seems to have gone to school on his approach. At times in the pandemic, she has gone out of her way to propagate the view that she fights hard for the tourism sector. She is certainly better regarded by industry leaders than her predecessor.
The only way for the Government to revive a tourism and hospitality sector that used to employ something like 270,000 people in the Republic is to perform CPR on Ireland's air connectivity
When Covid-19 was raging, realistically she could do little but get the Government to quieten the sector’s howls of pain with compensation and Martin, to her credit, bled a lot of financial support out of the Department of Finance in last October’s budget. But as soon as the vaccination campaign started slowing down the virus, stories began to appear about how she was making the case in Government to lift travel restrictions and speed up the EU travel cert.
The Delta surge in summer forced her to beat a temporary tactical retreat. But soon afterwards as vaccinations began to tame Delta too, the tales of her trenchancy switched to how she was fighting to reopen large sections of the entertainment industry. That is also essential for tourism to flow.
It is hard from the outside to assess the full extent of those political fights. Were they bone-crushing MMA or more pantomime WWE, designed to show the industry how committed she was? Somewhere in between, you’d expect.
However, Martin must now limber up for a genuine scrap – the Battle for Britain, or, at least, for its outbound tourists. As international travel opens up, Ireland is going to have to go to war with other hungry European countries to win back the hordes of British travellers lost to the pandemic.
In 2019, British visitors numbered 4.8 million to the island and spent almost €1.5 billion. They are vitally important. Martin was in London on Thursday to “push the green button” on a campaign to woo them.
Competitive battle
But this competitive battle with other countries will also have a twist for Martin. She is deputy leader of the Green Party, which has vowed for years to pare back the aviation industry as part of the fight against climate change. While she has responsibility for tourism, her party leader, Eamon Ryan, is Minister for Transport, overseeing aviation.
We live on an island and 90 per cent of all visitors arrive here by air. The only way for the Government to revive a tourism and hospitality sector that used to employ something like 270,000 people in the Republic is to perform CPR on Ireland’s air connectivity.
That will mean locking lips with airlines such as Ryanair and Aer Lingus to financially incentivise them to restore planes and routes to the Irish market. That is going to feel like anathema to the two Green Party politicians and it could inflame their party's base, or at least the bolshier part of it that naturally looks towards Martin.
There is a genuine opportunity there for a Green Minister to bring some vision to the development of sustainable tourism activity and greener practices
If the two Ministers don’t set aside their climate concerns about encouraging air travel for the short term, at least, the aviation and tourism sectors are in for a dire 2022, on top of a disastrous 2020 and a barely-better 2021. The Greens are in charge of the sector and will be blamed if it stays subdued. It is a genuine political and policymaking quandary.
Martin made some of the right noises on Thursday in a speech to a reception of British tourism industry decision-makers at the Irish Embassy in London. She expressed a willingness to "roll out the green carpet" to welcome back British visitors. But she didn't say how she wanted them to get here. It was left to Niall Gibbons, chief executive of Tourism Ireland, to refer to air connectivity.
Pressure game
Michael O’Leary’s Ryanair told The Irish Times recently that he is moving between 10 and 20 per cent of its capacity off the island of Ireland to other European destinations that are offering better incentives than Ireland. This is an old O’Leary pressure game. But he isn’t playing.
He will move those planes to other airports if he does not get his way, and with it, he will take the chance of bringing in a lot of British visitors. What are Martin and Ryan prepared to do to get him to bring those planes back to Ireland?
Martin also spoke at the embassy about boosting “sustainable tourism”. In the past, that phrase was sometimes seen as code for strategically paring back the number of visitors to overrun hotspots. But now, the notion is more intertwined with more ethical and environmentally-aware tourism focused on showcasing natural beauty and landscape, without wrecking it.
There is a genuine opportunity there for a Green Minister to bring some vision to the development of sustainable tourism activity and greener practices. It will surely aid retention of domestic holidaymakers, who also will need to be wooed for a long time to plug some of the gap as international travel is rebuilt.
The decisions made over the next six to 12 months could determine the arc of Irish tourism’s recovery for the next five or six years. Martin and her Green colleagues will have to decide what sort of relationship they want to have with the aviation and, by extension, the tourism sectors.
She already appears to have accepted that immediate revival of the British market must be a priority. That implies that she must also accept that, for the time being, a concerted effort must be made to restore short-haul flights that are especially frowned upon by the environmental movement.
These are the sort of trade-offs necessary for responsible governance.