I acknowledge the huge work that has been done by so many people around the country, particularly in a voluntary capacity to develop the tourism package that we offer to people. Tourists come to Ireland for a number of reasons. There is leisure tourism and activity tourism. We have a lot of that in my region with the Shannon waterway among others. We also have a lot of hill walking, etc. In addition, we have interest tourism - people who want to come to look at history and how people lived in the past or developed. We have the coal mining experience in Arigna, Seán Mac Diarmada's Cottage in north Leitrim as well as Yeats country. We have all of the types of tourism packages that attract people and bring those who have an interest in a particular region or a particular area. The Government needs to put more investment into all of that and ensure that we have the level of support required to build the critical mass so that it can work on its own. Very often in the early days that is one of the critical points as a lot of tourism packages cannot develop without support. The Wild Atlantic Way has been a great success from a marketing perspective, as has the Hidden Heartlands, which also runs through a lot of my area. It has a lot more potential and needs a lot more investment. I want to return to a topic that was raised by others, namely, festivals. They are a big part of summer tourism attractions, in particular in a lot of small places around the country. People come to music festivals, literature festivals and whatever else. A lot of them are organised by community projects and community groups and they need funding and assistance to ensure they can survive. In the past, some of them got bits of assistance from the local authorities. Then there is a need for a bit of crowd control and the Garda charges them a fortune to manage the crowd. It just seems to turn it on its head. There needs to be an overall examination of all of that. Finally, I want to come to the issue of tickets.ie. As we know, it went wallop in the last week. A lot of festivals around the country were affected. The Rory Gallagher International Festival in Ballyshannon, County Donegal has lost an awful lot of money. The organisers do not know where it has gone. It has disappeared. Cowboys and Heroes in Ballinamore, County Leitrim is a country music festival that was on again last weekend. Everybody who attended had a tremendous time. It was wonderful, but the promoters say there is no money there any more. This company is owned by DEAG, which is the largest shareholder. I understand it is a German company with an annual turnover of about €450 million, so there is no absence of money in the parent company, which needs to be held accountable for this. My understanding is that in the past couple years since it was taken over by international companies, it has been scaled down. Its offices have been closed. It has been scaled down to the stage where it was all being run by one man working from home. Now, it has pulled the plug on it and nobody knows where it has gone. There is an issue about how we regulate such agencies and organisations. A solicitor or an auctioneer has to have a client account. That is what it was doing. It was handling clients’ money. It was selling the tickets to the customers, taking in the money, holding it and giving it back. There is no such thing as client account in these organisations. There needs to be an examination of how this can be properly regulated and properly done. There also needs to be some kind of compensation, particularly for the community organisations but for all the organisations that run festivals around the country that may be largely out of pocket because of this.

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