Unless a radical approach was adopted which committed regions like the West of Ireland to developing a distinctive tourism product they would continue to lose market share and vitally important tourism revenues.

This was stated by Marian Harkin TD, MEP when she commented on the year end tourism report which showed the West and the more peripheral areas losing out while urban areas like Dublin continued to increase their share of Ireland’s tourism market.

“It seems that the visitor pattern has changed significantly with the traditional longstay visitor being replaced by short stay tourists who increasingly go no further than the cities and hinterlands served by low cost air services”, she said.  With access and travel time increasingly important factors influencing the decisions of tourists it was vital for the more distant areas to differentiate their tourism product in a way which would provide them with the means of off-setting peripherality problems, Marian Harkin said.

Linked tourism projects with catering outlets providing a distinctive Irish experience represented the best prospect for peripheral rural areas to increase revenue and jobs, she said.  She called on Tourism Ireland to provide the level of funding necessary to enhance the product which would attract longstay tourists to the peripheral regions and reduce their dependence on domestic visitors. 

“This will require a change in current budgeting but Tourism Ireland will not be doing it’s job properly if it fails to recognise that there is a still a market for an intrinsically Irish tourism product based on quality of experience”, Marian Harkin said. If this product was not better than had existed up to now, and if it was not backed with the necessary marketing resources and expertise, then tourism faced a very bleak future indeed in Ireland’s peripheral areas, the Independent TD and MEP Marian Harkin said.