The Department of Tourism and Trade, through its tourism division, has responsibility for the formulation of national policy on tourism and for monitoring its implementation. The execution of this policy is a matter for the main tourism agencies, Bord Fáilte, CERT and SFADCo.
Bord Fáilte is responsible for promoting and developing tourism traffic in and to the State in accordance with the Tourist Traffic Acts, 1931-95. Since 1995 Bord Fáilte has been restructured to secure a new focus on aggressively marketing the Irish tourism product worldwide.
CERT, the Council for Education, Recruitment and Training for the Hotel, Catering and Tourism Industry, was established in 1963 with the objective of ensuring the highest management and operational standards through the provision of a trained workforce and advisory service to industry managers.
Shannon Development is responsible for tourism development in the mid-west region, including development of new tourism products and provision of tourist information services.
In their execution of tourism policy the agencies retain day-to-day responsibility for their expenditure and for the operation of the schemes and services provided by them to the tourism industry. The agencies report directly to the Department which monitors their respective performance against policy objectives including overall expenditure of grants-in-aid from the Department's Vote.
The main issues in respect of which the Department is currently developing and monitoring policy are set out in the Department's Strategic Management Statement, 1997-99 recently published as part of the "Delivering Better Government" initiative. A copy of the statement is available in the Dáil Library.
The process of monitoring implementation of policy is carried out by the Department through regular liaison meetings with the agencies and through ongoing contact by my officials at all levels with both the agencies and the sector. This contact is supplemented and expanded in the course of exchanges arising through participation by the Department and the agencies in other consultative and advisory fora such as the National Tourism Council and the National Monitoring Committee for the Operational Programme for Tourism, 1994-99.
Overall, I am of the view that the processes which I have outlined adequately serve to position my Department so that it can monitor effectively the implementation of tourism policy. I am also satisfied they are sufficiently flexible and pragmatic to accommodate all incremental changes in policy that are required from time to time.