Lack of government planning impacting on hotel spaces

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A Cashel based community activist has criticised the Government’s poor planning when it comes to tourism and hotel spaces.

This week Leo Varadkar made comments about increasing the VAT to deter hotels from price gouging as people continue to report huge increases in the cost of staycations in Ireland.

Liam Browne told Tipp Today that the problem lies in the lack of planning for the future and the approach being taken by the Government whereby they only look to the next election.

He says that calls for more hotel spaces are pointless when there isn’t the space to develop, and Ukrainian refugees are taking now living in many of the hotel around the country.

He feels there should be a 3 month plan developed before more refugees are taken in and to help the whole tourism sector during the summer.

“We have got to plan for the future and that’s going to be very difficult because we don’t have enough people to build extra hotels if we’re going to build extra houses, we don’t have any idea how many extra people are going to come in.”

“We have got to sit down and start planning for more than a week or two.”