Andrew Doyle TD, today (Wednesday) welcomed the latest official data on overseas travel from the Central Statistics Office (CSO), which showed an increase of 12.5% in overseas visits to Ireland for the first nine months of 2015 compared to the same period of 2014.
Commenting on the data released by the CSO, Doyle said ‘The figures confirm a very strong performance by Irish tourism with all of our main overseas markets continuing to show significant growth. With an additional €2 million for tourism in Budget 2016, which will be used for key elements of Fáilte Ireland’s and Tourism Ireland’s programmes, including for co-operative overseas marketing relevant to Wicklow, Ireland’s Ancient East and the Rugby World Cup 2023 bid. One million euro of this will be allocated towards overseas marketing for the year ahead, bringing the total allocation to just over €35 million next year.
The overall tourism goal of Government is that by 2025, revenue from overseas visitors, excluding carrier receipts, will increase to €5 billion, net of inflation. We aim to have 10 million visits to Ireland annually by 2025 and that employment in the sector would rise to 250,000.’
Today’s CSO figures on Overseas Travel show:
- At over 6.64 million visits, overall trips to Ireland were up 12.5% in the first nine months of 2015 compared to the same period in 2014. For the three-month period from July to September 2015, overseas trips to Ireland increased by 13.5%.
- Visits from Mainland Europe grew by 13.7% for January to September 2015, to 2,363,900 visits and by 14.6% for the July to September period.
- North America registered an increase of 13.6% for January – September 2015 (1,209,300 visits) and an increase of 12.3% in the July – September 2015 period;
- Visits from Great Britain were up by 11.1% for January – September 2015 (2,662,500 visits) and by 13.9% for the three months from July to September 2015 compared to the corresponding period of 2014.
- Visits from the rest of the world (mostly long-haul and developing markets) totalled 411,400 for the first nine months of 2015 (representing an increase of 11.2%) and increased by 10.0% for the three months from July to September
“I am pleased to note the strong performance in our overseas visitor numbers. In addition expenditure on domestic holidays had increased by 10.6% for the same period. Combined with today’s visitor numbers we can see that our tourism sector is enjoying a great year and the hard work of the tourism industry is paying dividends. This has also been recognised by the recent report carried out by the the Hotel Federation of Ireland
“These latest CSO figures indicate that tourism growing from strength to strength particularly in our key markets. We must focus on continuing to provide visitors with unique experiences and value for money in order to ensure tourism growth continues into 2016 here in County Wicklow and Ireland” concluded Doyle