TD highlights jobs potential of tourism

TOURISM AND CULTURE:IT IS time for the Government to stop insulting the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport which provides more jobs than agriculture or financial services, Labour spokeswoman Mary Upton said.

She told delegates the department was treated as some sort of “ministry for fun”, for junkets or as a “department of demotion”.

The Dublin South Central TD said “this kind of disrespect and arrogance” was “insulting to the areas that this ministry is supposed to represent”.

Insisting that the department should be treated seriously, she said “tourism provides more jobs than agriculture or financial services, and it does so in some of the most remote areas of the country”.

Ms Upton was speaking as delegates backed a motion calling for the artists’ tax exemption to be retained for those earning a maximum annual income of €50,000. She said it should be for those who deserve it, “not those with the best accountants”.

Delegates criticised the Government’s decision to put € 30 million in direct funding towards the horse and greyhound industries “at a time when the funding for sports and arts has been severely diminished”.

Ms Upton criticised the “rebranding” of the department from Arts, Sport and Tourism to Culture, Tourism and Sport, but said she hoped the new Minister for Culture Mary Hanafin would bring “some much-needed initiative into the area”.

She said the artists’ exemption scheme was established in the 1960s to assist new and struggling artists and was “never intended to allow a former taoiseach to claim tax relief, no matter how inventive his memoirs were”.

“It was never meant to allow mega rock groups to write off their taxes whilst offering citizens and Government advice on how to save the world.”

The motion was proposed by Cllr Jane Dillon Byrne from Dublin South Central.

A Rathdrum, Co Wicklow, delegate said the restriction should be averaged out over five years because artists sometimes earned their incomes in “compact bursts”. The scheme was always intended to be restricted but the biggest beneficiaries “have already moved offshore”.