Following 3 years of massive decline in British visitor numbers, growth returned in 2011. Is this the start of the much hoped for recovery?

ITIC spoke with Vanessa Markey, Head of Great Britain for Tourism Ireland. Click on the video below to hear what she had to say.

January 31st 2012

The Booz report on future options for both Shannon and Cork airports leaves some questions unanswered.

The consultants have recommended that Shannon could be spun off from the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) into a new public body, possibly along with Shannon Development and some local bodies. This idea has been floating around for some time.

Cork should remain with the DAA, as it would not be able to manage its €200 million debts as a stand-alone entity, Booz said. Lumbering the DAA with these borrowings is not feasible. Its debts currently stand at about €1 billion. Privatisation for either airport was never going to be a runner, for now at least.

Booz has suggested Shannon might be run by a private operator via a lease arrangement, as is the case with Luton Airport.

read the full article in the Irish Times

Further information on the salvation of the Cork-Swansea ferry service unfolded today in The Examiner as it was revealed that shareholders of the West Cork Tourism Cooperative may invest further in the Cork-Swansea ferry operation in order to see it through examinership.

The talks included the need for a sales and marketing manager for 2012 and and an agreement to source additional funding.

Read the full article in IrishExaminer.com

Todays Irish Times reports in detail, the Governments plan to cut public service staff. Thousands of public sector jobs are to be cut between this year and 2015 under a massive public sector reform programme unveiled by the Government yesterday.

In addition to 23,500 jobs being culled, the controversial decentralisation programme, on which millions had already been spent, is being scrapped.

Under the plan presented by Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin, the Government is to slim down staffing levels in the public service to 282,500 within four years in a move which it maintained would generate gross savings of €2.5 billion on its pay bill. There will be no compulsory redundancies.
There are currently just under 300,000 people working in the public service.

Reducing staffing levels to the extent planned could cost the Government up to €300 million in additional pension costs every year, a spokesman for the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform said.

The overall amount to be saved by the public service reform measures announced yesterday, which include merging quangos and reforming leave entitlements in the public service, has not been spelled out in the plan.

Some €44 million had been spent on acquiring sites for the planned decentralisation of public service offices and State agencies which will not now go ahead.
Drogheda in Co Louth will be one of the biggest losers from this. More than €10 million was spent by the Office of Public Works buying a site in Drogheda to provide a new headquarters for the Department of Social Protection, which will not now move to the town.

A total of 40 decentralisation projects on which work never started have been scrapped, while 30 others will remain. A further 20 will be reviewed again shortly by the Cabinet.

The Government has also announced that 48 State bodies, sometimes referred to as quangos, are to be abolished or merged next year, while a further 46 will be reviewed.

Opposition parties and health sector unions expressed concern about the effect the cuts will have on “frontline services”.

Ruthlessness is key to delivery of ambitious plan

Dan O’Brien, Economics Editor of the Irish Times reports on how the plan should be delivered.

There is a north-south division in Europe in how many things in the continent’s countries function. Few are as marked as how public sectors function. In northern Europe, states and their agencies generally work efficiently. In southern Europe, public institutions have a much greater tendency to serve themselves rather than those they exist to serve.

Is the Irish public sector more Mediterranean than Baltic, and will yesterday’s public sector reforms nudge the sector towards northern best practices?
The answer to the first question largely reflects geography – the Irish public sector is roughly half way between its northern and southern counterparts when assessed in the round. It is more northern European with regards to workers’ sense of civic duty, their work ethic and levels of corruption, but more southern when it comes to efficiency and the quality of outcomes.

Among the specific weaknesses are a lack of rigour in policy formulation and evaluation; limited joined-up thinking on issues which cut across departments; poor structures of accountability; and a very bad record of implementation (for a comparative, evidence-based assessment of the quality of Irish public sector, the two-page summary in last week’s Public Sector Trends report by the Institute of Public Administration is a must-read).

Yesterday’s plan for reform is certainly wide-ranging and ambitious, with many unambiguously good things proposed. Further decentralisation of the public sector – an act of vandalism perpetrated on the administrative system – has been definitively halted.

A good-sized step towards modernising how taxpayers’ money is spent will have been taken if all measures set out yesterday are implemented. A commitment to expanding the number of publicly available metrics by which performance in the public sector is measured can only improve matters.
There was not only no shortage of detail in the Government’s new reform plan, but it included an end-date for implementation of its hundreds of measures. This is different from the past and will help maintain reform momentum.

But the big question about yesterday’s plan is how successfully it will be implemented. Resistance to change from within the public sector is strong – Government sources privately say that departments did next to nothing in putting forward ideas on reforming themselves. That is indicative of a general (though not universal) absence of urgency among senior officials in many departments.

This hostility to change combined with Ireland’s pervasive political and administrative inertia have always hindered change.
They will continue to work against it. Considerable and continued ruthlessness will be needed to defeat them. Unfortunately, there is little sign that the new administration is more prepared to displease mandarins than was its predecessor. The manner, for instance, in which the Government has acted to support the boss of the Department of Finance, Kevin Cardiff, does not suggest that the Coalition is endowed with a new steeliness.

That said, the personalities on the side of reform give some reason for cautious optimism. Brendan Howlin has energy and wants to change things.
Brian Hayes likes to get stuck in. Their top bureaucrat, Robert Watt, is aggressively ambitious about reform. Paul Reid, the delivery czar, newly recruited from the private sector, was rated as “very good” by a knowledgeable non-civil servant close to the appointment process.

That both Taoiseach and Tánaiste launched the reform plan with the two relevant Ministers signals commitment at the very top to change.
Speaking to The Irish Times yesterday, Richard Boyle, author of the IPA report mentioned above, broadly welcomed the content of the new reform plan, but put the delivery issue front and centre. Good intentions in the past, he noted, have too often come to nothing.

He added that delivering will be even more difficult on this occasion owing to the reductions in capacity.

Eddie Molloy, the management consultant who speaks truth to power in a way few do in Ireland, believes feet will have to be held to the fire on a regular basis to ensure change happens.

He suggests quarterly reviews with secretary generals to keep up the pressure. Naming, shaming and, ultimately, firing of those who fail to deliver will be needed if real change is to come about.

Yesterday’s plan is unlikely to herald a revolution in the public sector that would bring about Nordic efficiency levels, but if those behind it spend the next four years driving change improvements are in prospect.

Today’s Irish Independent reports that one of the world’s biggest travel operators may ask Irish hotels to sign contracts agreeing to pay it in punts if the euro collapses or Ireland exits the eurozone.

TUI Group runs both LateRooms.com and HotelBeds.com, booking rooms for well-known hotel chains including the Radisson, Clarion and Jurys Inn and tickets for the venues The O2 and Grand Canal Theatre.

The Radisson and Clarion groups said they had not been asked by TUI to commit to any euro collapse disaster plan, but management at both were aware that TUI had asked Greek hotel operators to sign contracts agreeing to pay in drachmas if the euro no longer exists.

Read the full article in  The Irish Independent.

British Airways and Iberia parent IAG has reached a deal with Lufthansa to buy loss-making British Midland.

The deal, believed to be worth over 350 million euro, is expected to be completed in the coming weeks, with the transaction taking place in the first three months of 2012.

Read the full article on Travelmole .

This article was in today’s Irish Independent. Read the full article over here or an excerpt below.

SEVENTY jobs are likely to be cut and hundreds of passengers had their travel plans thrown into chaos after an examiner was appointed to Irish ferry company, Fastnet Lines.

The firm only resumed sailings on the Cork-Swansea route in March of last year. But a High Court examiner was appointed yesterday with soaring fuel prices and loss-making winter sailings blamed for its financial problems.

Mr Justice Peter Kelly appointed Michael McAteer of Grant Thornton as interim examiner and ordered all sailings to cease with immediate effect.

The firm secured court protection after it emerged it was insolvent with a deficit of €10.3m — rising to €13.2m in a winding-up scenario.

Full refunds will be issued to all intending passengers, and the High Court will hear details of the examiner assessment of the firm’s future viability on November 15.

Last night, Fastnet Lines apologised, but expressed hope that their Cork-Swansea service can resume by April 6 if its financial problems are resolved.

The firm said it will operate a schedule from April to September 2012 but will not operate over the winter months.

Read the full article  on Independent.ie

The West of Ireland has not only been attracting fewer overseas holidaymakers, but it has also been losing share of holiday visitors to the country. In view of this serious situation ITIC commissioned a fundamental re-assessment of both the potential and the barriers to attracting more tourists to the Western seaboard, from Donegal to Cork.

Read the findings of this assessment in the New Directions for Tourism in the West report  [opens in PDF, Adobe Acrobat] .

Watch this fantastic video below about Tourism in the West of Ireland

New Directions for Tourism in the West Report

The report, prepared by TTC- Tourism & Transport Consult International, analyses the loss of share of holidaymakers to Ireland going west, while an increasing number confine their visit to the capital and explore the west on a day trip from Dublin.

To compensate for the limited number of ‘must see’ attractions along the western seaboard, the tourism industry faces the challenge of creating and delivering more distinctive and memorable  experiences which exploit the natural, human and manmade assets of the area.

The report looks specifically at the innovative Great Western Greenway; the success of Killarney in managing the environment in Ireland’s oldest resort; and Galway’s successful events strategy to create a ‘happening place’.

Download the full report here [PDF, Adobe Acrobat] .

The Irish Tourism Industry Confederation has said there is an urgent need for innovation if the decline in tourism in the west of Ireland is to be reversed.

The Confederation estimates a 37% fall-off in demand for tourism in the west of Ireland between 1999 and 2010, using the amount of bed nights booked as its yardstick.

In a new report called New Direction For Tourism In The West, the confederation says that, from Donegal to Cork, the hospitality industry needs to create more distinctive reasons to visit.

CLICK HERE to read more…