Every now and then something happens that was predictable, foreseeable, and entirely certain to happen, and yet somehow in this country the public and the opposition parties fail entirely in their basic duty to connect the thing that has happened to the policies that caused it.
On Friday, we learned that tourism into Ireland in February 2025 was fully 30% lower than tourism into Ireland in 2024. It does not take a genius to work out the reasons for this, and how every single last one of those reasons is directly connected to Irish Government policy.
First, and most obviously, there has been the decision of two successive Irish Governments to re-purpose huge chunks of our hospitality industry away from tourism accommodation and into migrant accommodation. This, actually, has resulted – as my colleague Matt Treacy endlessly points out – in an absolute bonanza for the owners of the re-purposed hotels. They are making huge profits, not least because the amount of service expected from migrants is much lower than the service expected from tourists. You can fill the rooms, and employ fewer staff, for example. And provide much cheaper food.
But every hotel room occupied by a migrant instead of a tourist costs the economy much more than simply the cost of the room: Migrants are (as the ESRI helpfully reminded us on Friday) much poorer than Irish people, let alone tourists. Therefore they do fewer things to boost the economy than tourists do. They do not eat out in restaurants, or pay or horse-drawn tours around Killarney national park, or hire cars, or pay exorbitant tee-time costs at our various golf clubs. When you replace a tourist with a migrant, you replace a big-spending person in the local economy with somebody who the local economy actually has to subsidise.
This is economics 101.
The other impact of this policy is, of course, to make actual hotel rooms more scarce, and therefore more expensive. So Ireland has not just voluntarily reduced the capacity of the state to take in tourists, it has also driven up the cost of coming to Ireland and staying here. Genius.
But this is not only about migrants. In 2023, for example, the Government increased the hospitality VAT rate from 9% to 13.5% – a direct 4% flat increase to the cost of tourism into Ireland. The result? Fewer tourists, which is presumably why the new Government plans to reverse that tax increase.
Lest we forget, Government was explicitly warned at the time this decision was made that one of the results of it would be fewer tourists. It was foreseeable, and almost inevitable. They did it anyway.
Finally, we might point to crime as an issue. As we are all aware, Ireland is now a place where American tourists can be attacked on the street and hospitalised. Public safety is a responsibility of Government, and it is a responsibility that every Irish person knows that the Irish Government has neglected. Foreigners know it too, since reading is not a uniquely Irish skill.
All of this is before, of course, we discuss the impact of Covid 19, and the Irish state’s deliberate and conscious decision to put many hotels, restaurants, and other tourism-reliant businesses to the wall. You might understand that some voters, who still believe that lockdowns were necessary, might forgive that one. But it was, undeniably, part of what is now a sustained five-year political attack on the tourist industry.
A conspiratorially minded person might wonder, of course, whether a reduction in tourism does not align perfectly well with the Green Party’s agenda, when it was in Government: To reduce emissions. Fewer people coming here means fewer flights and means fewer carbon emissions in the economy. I am not, for clarity, suggesting that anything here was done deliberately with that in mind – but I am saying that tourism is not a sector that the Greens or their allies in the civil service will have been particularly eager to rescue.
In any case, the bottom line is clear: Political choices have political consequences. And the political consequence of a decimated tourist industry is a direct, foreseeable, and predictable result of a series of Government policies enacted over the last five years.
Opposition politicians could – and should – be highlighting that relentlessly. Indeed, if they were bringing the Dáil to a standstill until action was taken to restore our tourism industry, then they would have the full support of this publication.
But that is not what they are doing, is it? Instead, they are bringing the Dáil to a standstill to complain about speaking rights for Government TDs.
A country – any country – is only as good as the people running it. As the tourism industry is finding out, to its – and our – collective costs.