Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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To ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport the extent to which he expects the various bodies under his aegis to be in a position to make a sizeable or important contribution towards economic recovery in the coming year; if he has identified particular areas in the tourism, transport or sporting sectors that are likely to present specific opportunities in this regard; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [57195/12]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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The Programme for Government sets out the measures which the Government are taking to achieve economic recovery. The Programme places a heavy emphasis on tourism as one of the key areas for the generation of employment and also on the delivery of effective transport services. The Action Plan for Jobs 2012 is  designed to have 100,000 more people in work by 2016 and 2 million people in work by 2020. The net 100,000 jobs over the next five years to 2016 will be created through direct jobs in manufacturing (20,000) and internationally traded services (30,000) plus an additional 50,000 indirect spin‐off jobs.

I announced my priorities for 2012 and also my medium and longer term priorities on my Department's website.  Early in the new year, I  will both be reporting on the achievement of the 2012 priorities and setting out my priorities for 2013. The Statement of Strategy which is also publically available on the website sets out the specific measures that my Department will be taking in the period to 2014. A key commitment of that Strategy is to increase tourism numbers to 8 million by 2015. The Trade, Tourism and Investment Strategy of 2010 envisaged that this would result in an additional 15,000 directly employed in tourism.

Transport demand, on the other hand, is primarily derived from the outputs of other economic sectors. One would expect increases in demand and employment within the transport sector to result from increased economic outputs generally.