Tourist Accommodation
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-22
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Peter Burke (FG), Longford-Westmeath

I thank the Deputy for his response. I will point out one or two things. From my 13 years of experience in private practice as an accountant and from studying tax, one of the key things I always have in my mind is that I would never introduce a tax when a sector is reducing in numbers. That was the case in 2025. If we remember back to before we brought in our tourism strategy, A New Era for Irish Tourism, visitor numbers and visitor spend were going down and, by default, I would never introduce a tax against that backdrop. In 2026, we have seen a significant increase. Numbers are going up well. We saw 626,000 visitors from foreign countries in July alone. It is up 5% on 2025 and about 3% on 2024. Critically, we will be considering this right across Government but I want to be very clear that at this point in time, we have about 38,000 hotels in planning. For the viability of those to work out and for them to be delivered, we have to be careful about what new taxation measures we bring in. We have to get the backdrop right and, hopefully, with the tourism policy we will keep increasing our numbers at the moment.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-22/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-22