Consider for one moment that in 2025 Fáilte Ireland will spend about €225m developing and promoting Irish tourism.
Now consider that another arm of government, the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, will spend €1.2bn this year accommodating asylum seekers and refugees which will involve the State effectively closing tourist hotels in towns and villages all over Ireland.
To illustrate this contradiction, it’s worth remembering that the State recently bought Ireland’s largest hotel, the Citywest Hotel, for €148m with this sole purpose in mind. This one act effectively removes 764 hotel rooms from Ireland’s tourist accommodation bed stock.
The process of the State closing hotels has been especially pronounced in towns and villages throughout Ireland. Here, the pursuit of ‘value for money’ has seen the State contracting scores of budget hotels and B&Bs for accommodation purposes.
There have been clear winners in all of this – the State gets a quick fix solution for its asylum accommodation crisis and the hotel owners get lucrative state contracts without the hassle of having to actually run a commercial tourist business.
The losers rarely get mentioned. They include local employees who lose their jobs as well as downstream businesses like restaurants, pubs and tourist attractions who all lose out when the local hotel closes.
However, there is also a bigger loss to Irish tourism. Closing the local budget hotel invariably makes holidaying in Ireland more expensive. That two night stay now becomes a one night stay or simply a day trip. Or it might mean holidaying in Spain for a week for the cost of a weekend in an Irish four star hotel.
There is already evidence emerging that holidaying in Ireland is becoming too pricey both for Irish people and foreigners. This year’s year-on-year CSO figures for overseas visitors to Ireland in February, March and May showed falls of 30%, 15% and 10% respectively.
A feature of the State contracting hotels for asylum seekers and refugees is that it has happened largely outside the planning system. By any reasonable assessment, a change of use from accommodating paying tourists on short stays to housing non-paying asylum seekers on a permanent basis constitutes a material change of use of a building.
However, the State has gone to great lengths to exempt itself from such oversight. In fact, using a Section 4 planning exemption it has been possible to convert industrial buildings into residential buildings at the stroke of a pen.
Readers will be aware of the case of the disused Crown Paints factory in Coolock being proposed as a residential unit for asylum seekers. The plan has now been abandoned but the point remains that such a development was possible in the first instance without any planning oversight.
If you want a pen picture of the catastrophic impact of the State’s immigration policies on the tourism industry in an Irish town then look no further than Lisdoonvarna in Co. Clare. In 2019, local hotelier Marcus White announced his intention to sign a state contract to accommodate 115 asylum seekers at the King Thomond Hotel. Despite a 93% local vote against the move and no planning permission, the plan still went ahead.
This was later followed up with the closure of the town’s Hydro Hotel in order to house Ukrainian refugees. In fact, Lisdoonvarna ended up with over 800 Ukrainians making the locals a minority in their own community. Accordingly, the closure of most of the town’s hotel bed stock was done by the State and outside any planning oversight.
The official narrative seemed to be that anyone who had a problem with this was either racist or far right. This was also the narrative faithfully adopted by most of the Irish mainstream media.
Of course, the curious thing is that the State which has shown such utter disregard for the planning system in its attempts to solve its asylum accommodation problems has no problem about using the same planning system for its own ends when it suits.
Everyone will be aware that many property owners in the long term rental sector have instead moved into the short term holiday rental market. In part, this might be explained by the gap in the market left by the State’s closure of much of the budget hotel sector.
Either way, in an effort to hunt many of these back into the long term rental sector, the State has recently announced that the entire country is to become a Rent Pressure Zone meaning, it would appear, that AirBnB type short term rentals will need to apply for planning permission. No need to guess what the outcome of most of these applications will be!
The idea that the State is going to magically chase thousands of landlords back into the long-term rental market is itself open to question. So too is the assumption that all short-term accommodation is suitable for long-term rental. It might be so in Temple Bar and the like but short-term rentals outside of Dublin include accommodation such as farm outbuildings and the like which may not be suitable for long-term rental to begin with.
In addition, many AirBnB lettings are atypical and include quirky offerings such as old buses, glorified sheds and even tree houses. They hardly constitute long term rental stock.
That Ireland’s asylum system is utterly broken has now been conceded even by Taoiseach Micheál Martin who admitted in March of this year that the majority of asylum applicants were, in fact, economic migrants. The clear implication of that is that most of those in asylum accommodation shouldn’t even be in Ireland to begin with. Despite this, there appears to be a casual acceptance that Ireland’s tourism industry should be collateral damage for a broken asylum system which the State refuses to fix.
It is only fitting that mention should also be made of the right-on ‘refugees welcome’ brigade who invariably turn up to cheer the closure of yet another budget hotel in rural Ireland all the while calling anyone who disagrees with them far-right racists.
The irony, of course, is that not only have these people helped to make holidaying in Ireland unaffordable for themselves but for everyone else also. No doubt, they’ll be heading to the airport and Spain too for their holidays like most other Irish people. It all smacks a lot of ‘do what I say not what I do’.
With its own disregard for the planning system and the thrashing of the Irish tourism industry, the same could also be said for the Irish State.