Visitor Levy on Paid Overnight Accommodation: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-24 ============================================================ Gareth Scahill (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach The Minister is welcome to the Chamber. I commend Senator Fitzpatrick and her Fianna Fáil colleagues on tabling this motion. The first line reads, “a cornerstone of balanced regional development”. It was only last week we had a discussion and I called for more balanced regional development. I come from the north west, and we always feel that we do not get our fair share. We need a lot more investment to deliver the infrastructure we require. In the past three weeks, I had the Minister for tourism, Deputy Burke, in my home county of Roscommon and we visited Strokestown House and gardens. We visited the Arigna Mining Experience in the north of the county. We went to the John McGahern Barracks in Cootehall and finished up in Lough Key Forest and Activity Park for the Night and Day Festival. None of those locations has a hotel, so while we have the tourist attractions, a significant amount of work would need to happen for a county like Roscommon to benefit from a levy like this. I support the idea of empowering our local authorities and councillors but I would err and agree slightly with what the previous speaker said in relation to the executives in our local authorities and the whole idea of ring-fencing a fund. It is okay to ring-fence it right now, but we all know the practical implementation varies when it comes to management and hiding things away in the books within our local authorities. This needs to be teased out and worked on an awful lot more. Before I was a councillor on Roscommon County Council, I was a member for 12 years of a town team. We were established for public realm development and local promotion, effectively putting the best part of our local communities out and trying to access the many capital funds that thankfully are out there to ensure that we have the public realm enhancement, amenities and resources that we need locally to have our communities operating as best they can. Once we get areas to that stage - I do not feel we are at that stage yet - I would like the local authority to be in a position to introduce a measure like this to enhance and maintain them. One of the reasons parts of rural Ireland do not have an abundance of bed nights is the cost of developing a room to a sufficient standard to meet what the paying visitor will be prepared to pay. The people who take the punt on that pay significant development charges and, on an annual basis, significant rates. To say we would like them to use this money for clean streets and a few other public realms effectively means that we are just trying to generate a little bit more money and give the local authorities the opportunity to claw in a bit more money for them to spend as they see fit. That is the part I support, namely, giving local authorities that wish to do so the opportunity to introduce this, but rather than legislating for this, there is a very good example of a development fee in Knock Airport. Knock Airport does not take in enough fees from airlines to support the running of the airport. Therefore, every passenger who passes through Knock Airport pays a charge. That charge is paid at the local authority. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-06-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:06+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-24