Tourism Ireland Launches New Campaign

A new €12m seasonal tourism campaign has been launched by Tourism Ireland and Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Paschal Donohoe.

The autumn promotional campaign aims to boost late-season tourism, with the September to December period accounting for up to 30% of Ireland's annual overseas tourism business.

The campaign will highlight the many festivals and events taking place around the island this autumn – from the Dublin Theatre Festival to the Bram Stoker Festival, Culture Night, the Ulster Bank Belfast International Arts Festival, Wexford Festival Opera, Savour Kilkenny Food Festival, The Outing, Cork Jazz Festival and the Galway International Oyster and Seafood Festival. Tourism Ireland will also continue to highlight Yeats2015 and ID2015 (the year of Irish design) – taking every opportunity to leverage the tourism benefits of these year-long celebrations.

MinisterDonohoe said: "I am delighted to launch Tourism Ireland's Autumn marketing campaign. CSO figures for the period to the end of July showed that we had increased the number of overseas visitors coming to Ireland by over 12% compared to 2014.

"In fact, the results represented the highest ever number of visitors to Ireland in that first seven month period. The autumn campaign which will roll out in all of our main target overseas markets should ensure that the momentum is maintained and that 2015 will be a record year for Irish tourism.

"For the longer term, earlier this year the Government published a policy statement 'People, Place and Policy – Growing Tourism to 2025' and this week the second meeting of the new Tourism Leadership Group took place. The Group will drive the targets set out in the policy statement and we are now working on a detailed action plan to ensure that the strong tourism performance is maintained in the years ahead."

(MH/CD)