Hoteliers and owners of guesthouses have been asked to arrange a "day of welcomes" in their premises on May 1st, EU enlargement day, to mark the contribution employees from these EU accession countries already make to the tourism industry in Ireland.
At present, employees from these accession countries make up only a minority of the tourism industry's foreign workers. However, the likelihood is that their number will increase.
The call for a special "day of welcomes" came from the newly-elected president of the Irish Hotels Federation, Mr Dick Bourke, during the federation's annual conference in Killarney.
About one-fifth of the hotel and guesthouse industry's 57,000 employees are now non-national. Of the 12,000 or so non-national employees, some 3,000 are from the accession countries.
Mr Bourke told the conference that there was "significant potential" for Ireland's tourism industry to benefit from people from the accession countries who would travel here to work.
With the accession of the new countries to the EU, the hotel and guesthouse sector in Ireland could expect "an increasing number of high-calibre workers" to become available.
The IHF will be issuing a range of event ideas and suggestions to 1,000 hoteliers and guesthouse owners in the coming weeks.
Mr John Power, chief executive of the IHF, pointed out that the majority of the non-national employees in the hotel and guesthouse sector in Ireland were from non-EU countries, such as South Africa, Canada and the Philippines. People from outside the EU would now find it difficult to obtain work permits, although renewals of permits for existing workers should not be a problem.
Many hotel workers in the countries which were about to join the EU had been learning English over the past number of years in preparation for enlargement and the IHF had forged links with hotel schools in Poland and other countries.
Surveys had shown that hotels were now rated among the best employers in Ireland, ahead even of banking, he said.
In his address to delegates Mr Bourke said that the Government would have to "step up its efforts" to try to keep costs down and ensure that Ireland's competitiveness was maintained "not only for the hotel sector, but for private enterprise as a whole".
Costs arising from VAT, insurance and electricity were rising annually "way above the rate of inflation". Most of these costs were completely outside the control of the hotel industry, he said.
Ireland now had the second-highest rate of VAT in the EU and numerous attempts to have insurance costs reduced had failed to bear fruit.
Mr Bourke said that during the past year local authority charges, including water charges, had risen by between 5 and 30 per cent. He estimated that charges for electricity had gone up by almost 6 per cent, gas by more than 6 per cent, while postal charges had increased by 13 per cent.