€3 travel tax to stay
THE Government is to keep the €3 travel tax in place pending a review next Spring because the airlines have not responded by raising capacity.
It also announced a €8.5m initiative to boost inbound tourism from key overseas markets.
The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Leo Varadkar, said that he may suspend the tax next year depending on the reaction from the airlines.
As part of the Jobs Initiative, it was announced that the €3 Travel Tax would be suspended subject to a deal being reached with airlines to reinstate cancelled routes and restore lost capacity.
While the airlines welcomed the announcement, it was not possible at this time to secure solid commitments from them on inbound routes or capacity, the minister said.
In considering alternative proposals, Minister Varadkar made clear that the objective of the Government’s initiative was to increase the number of tourists travelling to Ireland; not to increase the number of Irish people using our airports to travel overseas.
Google Plus attracts 25m users so far
Google’s new social network has attracted 25 million users, making it the fastest website to reach that audience size, according to data released by comScore.
Google+, launched in late June, had 25m unique visitors as of July 24 and is growing at a rate of roughly one million visitors a day, comScore noted in a presentation.
In contrast, it took Facebook about three years to attract 25m visitors, while Twitter took just over 30 months, according to comScore.
While the data show Google’s latest attempt at breaking into social networking has started strongly, it may not mean the project is a long-term success. MySpace grew to 25m unique visitors in less than two years — faster than Facebook or Twitter. However, it’s lost a lot of visitors in the past year, comScore data show.
Most Google+ visitors come from outside the United States. More than 3.6m unique visitors have come from India, according to the data.
Government bonds buck trends
IRISH government bonds are bucking the latest weakness in European debt markets, with 10-year borrowing costs now close to 10pc for the first time since June 20. The Irish Independent reported that the yield on Irish government debt dropped below that for Portugal’s this week — a sign investors are slightly more optimistic about Irish longer term prospects. Irish bond yields are still three times what the country has to pay under the revised bailout deal.
There is no prospect of a return to the markets without a massive and sustained fall in bond yields. The trend is moving in the right direction, however. Irish 10-year bond yields have fallen from a high of 13.8pc before the European leaders’ summit on July 21 to 10.39pc yesterday.
The yield on short-term Irish bonds has fallen even more sharply. The theoretical cost of borrowing over two years has dropped back from 22pc to 13.73pc since the summit. Greece and Portugal saw yields rise yesterday while Irish yields fell. Italy and Spain are under pressure because of sharp yield rises over the past week.
