I am pleased to support the Minister's amendment. I listened with some interest to the speeches of Deputy Barrett, Deputy O'Leary and Deputy O'Brien. Deputy O'Leary suggested that Britain was a more attractive country to visit at the present time than this country is. Of course, the pint is cheaper in Britain. So is petrol. It is much too facile, however, to suggest these are the sole reasons why people go on holidays. The attractions this country has for the tourist are in an entirely different area from those of Britain.
Deputy O'Leary referred to the necessity for restoring competitiveness. Having travelled quite a bit in the last year, it is my considered judgment that this country is extremely competitive. There are particular reasons why it is competitive. The £ is now purchasing more for visitors. Petroleum is a fuel used by aerlines and bringing people to sunny climes is costly now because of surcharges. That makes this country even more competitive and Irish people thinking of going abroad are having to think again. Of course, we have inflation and, of course, we have rising costs. Those who stress this fail to recognise that the same factors have been ravaging the economies of other countries in western Europe and these countries are extremely expensive. When talking about the tourist industry here, it is important to examine the position in other countries. The price of petrol in Italy is round about £1.10 per gallon. In Denmark it is 90 pence. In France it is 85 pence. In Holland it is 85 pence. In Spain it is 93 pence. In Belgium it is 85 pence. When talking about motorists coming in here, one must think of the motorist driving across continental Europe to the Riviera and down into Italy and Spain. The motorist who brings his car in here and drives down to the west and back again and does 300 miles holiday motoring does a total of roughly 620 miles. At 30 miles to the gallon that would cost a family an extra £2 having regard to the rise in petrol. If you divide that £2 among four people, it works out at about 50 pence each. It is a lot of damn nonsense to pretend that petrol is a critical factor which will make people decide this country is not a suitable place in which to have a holiday.
Nobody need tell me that visitors come here to drink our pints. They come for other reasons and hopefully will enjoy their pints, but this is not in any sense a critical factor. We should relate the prices of some of these commodities to the prices in other countries. Britain is not the only country in Europe with which we want to make comparisons. Some years ago there were ten or 11 German marks to the Irish £; now there are five or six. That is an extremely expensive country. There were 17 or 18 French francs to the £ a few years ago, now there are 8½. In Norway a few years ago there were 15 or 16 kroner to the £; and 20 kroner to the £ ten years ago, now there are 11. The popular drink there is draught lager and in any bar or hotel the pint costs £1. If we want to talk about competitiveness, let us look around other countries in Europe, at the recent revaluation of the dollar against the £ and the prices in reasonable resorts in the United States.
There is a much too facile comparison between costs here and costs in other countries, such as Spain, to which people traditionally go for holidays. In many cases we are not comparing like with like. There is a tendency to compare the price of a fortnight's holiday in one of our best hotels with a fortnight's holiday in Spain. Very often sufficient emphasis is not put on the fact that the holiday in Spain is a bargain holiday in a hotel which is not in any sense competitive with our hotels. People who want to indulge in comparisons should compare like with like and compare their holidays in Spain, France, Germany or Italy with hotels of an equal standard. They will begin to realise the essential competitiveness of this country in the tourist industry.
Deputy Barrett suggested that we were over-stating the question of whether Ireland was a safe country in which to holiday. I do not think we are over-stressing it. The wonder is that today—when we have an economic depression compounded within this country by the Northern situation—we have not only managed to maintain but to increase tourist traffic. Various agencies outside this country, Bord Fáilte, Aer Lingus, CIE and the embassies, are doing their best but their promotional funds are limited. Let us look at North America.
The Bord Fáilte budget for promotional activities is limited. When one takes into account the vast amount of material on the media—television, newspapers and so on—about the problems that affect this island, and the fact that people at that distance do not fully appreciate as we obviously do the distinctions that exist between the north-east and the south, one realises that they have been doing a very good job in difficult circumstances.
The Government's attitude in the area of security is important and is under-pinning the stability of the free movement of people between Ireland and other countries. The Government have been doing a good job in getting this message across. The Minister has been involved in the promotion of tourism. In the last two or three years he spent a considerable amount of time abroad engaging in personal promotion of tourism and, particularly in America, this has generated a great deal of satisfactory publicity which has been very helpful.
While the Government's attitude to tourism is very important, there are other areas at which we should have a look. In this industry, more than in any other sector, the attitudes that prevail are vital to whether we will generate increases in our tourist industry. Irrespective of the Government of the day, the attitudes prevailing among hoteliers, local authorities and restaurants to service, cleanliness and good food, are all important. It is essential that we are training the right people, that they are getting the opportunity to develop their businesses, that they are going after business and are running their businesses the way they should be. These are critical factors which will make or break the tourist industry.
In the past we were a little indiscriminate in giving hotel grants. As the Minister said in his speech, there was a tendency to be a little indiscriminate in giving grants to certain kinds of people in the hotel industry and, in certain instances, about the location of hotels. It was unfortunate that we did not encourage more the building of hotels by people trained in the hotel industry. Many of these people trained in the Shannon hotel school or abroad, had the ability and the knowledge of what the market needed, but in some cases did not have the money to do it themselves. It might have been better policy in earlier years to have taken more risks by funding such people in the form of grants and loans, rather than some cases we have seen where people without any knowledge of that sector have gone into the business and some of whom have done a less than good job.
There is a great deal of scope in the tourist industry, scope that does not require a great deal of investment. There is scope in improving our standards. There seems to be great scope in family operations, guesthouses and smaller hotels where overheads are held at a lower level. There is scope for improvement in cooking, the area of presentation and in the area of cleanliness. Bord Fáilte are right to stress how very important standards are if we want to be competitive in an international context. There are areas we need to look to and standards must be raised if our competitiveness is to be enhanced.
Deputy O'Leary referred to downgrading by Bord Fáilte. In my experience if they are finding it necessary to adopt a tough attitude that is in the national interest, regardless of how much it may hurt. In general, many of the things we need to do will not need much investment, but merely require higher standards. This is where the scope lies. When we speak about promotion abroad and the sums spent in the United States, Britain and Europe, we must realise that the best promotion is the good name a guesthouse gets for the style in which it presents breakfast and the standards of cleanliness in the bedrooms. This is one of the greatest generators of future business. The industry should look to itself to see what it can do. Deputy O'Leary quoted the chairman of Córas Tráchtála, Mr. Colm Barnes, who suggested that the Government would need to look to their political convictions to help business, that there was no future in this country and that the Government were hostile to business. That is a lot of nonsense. There is scope in this country, especially in the areas of export manufacturing, where there are CTT grants, credit facilities, and tax-free incentives which are greater than those which exist in any other European country today.
One point I do not understand in relation to Deputy Leonard's speech is the confusion that apparently exists over figures. Deputy Leonard suggested that Bord Fáilte's promotional budgets had shrunk steadily over the past three years. This seems to be entirely at variance with the facts. The statistics which I have had extracted suggest that the total amounts issued—this covers more than promotion—to Bord Fáilte in each of the last four years, together with the current year's allocation, are as follows: 1972, £7.45 million; 1973, £7.5 million; 1974, for nine months, £5.3 million and 1975, £9.03 million and in the budget for 1976, £10.45 million. This is at variance with the suggestions made by Deputy Leonard. If one wants to get a picture of promotional expenditure in isolation, if we take account only of subhead F11, of the Vote for Transport and Power, from which Bord Fáilte promotional expenditure comes, rather than what the total Bord Fáilte allocations are, we get a clearer picture. The amounts issued from this source over the same four years, together with the 1976 allocation are as follows: 1972, £4.25 million; 1973, £5.45 million; 1974, for nine months, £4 million; 1975, £7.1 million and 1976, £7.75 million. In other words, the 1976 allocations are over 80 per cent higher than the amounts in 1972. This has more than kept pace with inflation during that period.
The tourist earnings in the last four years are as follows: 1972, £91.4 million, a decrease from that of the previous year; 1973, £110 million; 1974, £130 million, and 1975, £161 million. Against a very depressed economic background—there was depression in agriculture because of the problems of the cattle industry the previous winter—tourism, which people had not expected to be so buoyant, was very alive and was a very substantial factor in the Irish economy last year.
I welcome the new Bill concerning Bord Fáilte which the Minister introduced a few months ago. I am glad to note the emphasis on water sports in their national plan report. I want to mention one or two local matters concerning the Clew Bay area because there has been tremendous development there in regard to the provision of hotels, guesthouses, restaurants, a championship golf course and sea angling activities. The bay which has about 300 islands is probably the most sheltered water on the entire west coast and offers great scope for water sports, particularly sailing in which French interests have recently become involved in the purchase of part of one of the islands. A sailing club was formed there recently. I would very much like to see Bord Fáilte take a special interest in this type of promotion because I believe it has tremendous scope especially for those who carry small boats, such as dinghies in trailers behind their cars.
