Should the money be set aside for, say, more maintenance for council housing citywide? Or for tourist-y things in tourist-y areas? Or something else?
When debate around a possible tourist levy for Dublin has come up at city council meetings, ideas for how to spend the many millions – as much as €46 million, in one model – has spilled out.
It should support communities and keep streets clean in high-tourist areas, said Kourtney Kenny, a Sinn Féin councilor, when the question arose at a meeting of the council's finance committee in March.
It could be spent on supporting the Irish language in the city, said Susan Whelan, of the Greenfields Residents Association, who's also on the finance committee.
No, said Michael Pidgeon, the Green Party councillor. Ideally, it would go into the council's general budget and councillors could then decide priorities of how to spend it each year, he said.
As work progresses at a national level on proposals that would allow the council to actually bring in a tourist levy, the question of whether it should be ring-fenced and if so, for what, has become more pointed.
A private members bill introduced late last month by Fianna Fáil TD Paul McAuliffe would allow the four Dublin local authorities to bring in a levy on overnight stays in tourist accommodation.
It also sets out that money raised by a council from such a tourist levy should be used for "tourism infrastructure and services, improvements to the public realm, culture, sporting or heritage events, sustainable tourism initiatives and other purposes connected with the impact of tourism".
Meanwhile, the report of the government's Interdepartmental Group on the Dublin City Taskforce suggested an "accommodation tax/levy" as one stream of funding to be used for regeneration in the city centre, and only on initiatives within the taskforce area – which focuses on a "core" in the north inner-city, but has regard to a wider area that extends south of the Liffey too.
In contrast to these proposals, a series of motions passed at Dublin City Council's area committees, and its housing committee in recent months have sought a roll-back of council rent hikes sold as a way to bring in more money to better maintain council housing, and to look at plugging gaps in funding for maintenance with money from the tourist levy.
Sinn Féin Councillor Séamas McGrattan, who chairs the council's finance committee, said the priority for him is that, if a tourist levy is introduced, any funding raised through it would be on top of the council's existing budget and funding streams.
Ring-fencing the revenue from the tourist levy would be a way to assure that happens, McGrattan said, even if it takes away some of the democratic discretion at a local level over how it is spent.
If any funding just goes into the general pot of council funding, it could just serve as an excuse for central government to withdraw other grants to the same amount, he said. "That's the fear I would have."
That's what has happened with the Local Property Tax: rather than just leave the council with more revenue from that stream, the central government reduced the amount it gave the council in grants, leaving it with little more than it had in the first place.
It should be possible to spend the revenue from a tourist levy in a way that is of broad benefit to tourists who are paying it, and the residents of the city, depending on how it is set up by central government, McGrattan said. "I don't know how prescriptive they're going to be on it."
A spokesperson for the Department of Enterprise said that work on a potential tourist levy is "at an early stage" and "will require stakeholder engagement and further policy development before any proposals are brought to Government for consideration, including on the use of any revenues that might be generated".
Dublin City Council officials and councillors have pushed for decades for a hotel bed tax, the kind of levy on tourists found in cities worldwide, to supplement funding for public services.
“As long as I’ve been in this council, there’s been proposals for a bedroom tax, or a tourism tax. We’d be very supportive of that,” said former Chief Executive Owen Keegan in January 2020, during a full council meeting at City Hall.
“But in all the years since I joined this council in 1993, it’s never been delivered,” he said. “I don’t have the power to deliver that.”
At that debate, councillors were arguing against the sell-off of 15 parcels of council land, worth more than €90 million.
Keegan said the sales were needed – for lack of other funding such as a hotel bed tax – to cover a diverse mix of city projects, from demolishing the old Ballymun Shopping Centre, to installing drainage on sports pitches.
One reason the hotel bed tax hasn't happened, though, has been wariness from the hospitality industry, which has lobbied hard against it in the past.
Stephen Browne, head of public affairs at Dublin Chamber, said that a survey of its members has show that there is now general support for a tourist levy.
Forty-four percent of their members surveyed support such a levy, while 27 percent are neutral or undecided, he said.
But "we do want any money taken in to be used in Dublin on services that benefit everybody who uses Dublin – so public realm improvements, lighting, street-cleaning". It would have to be ring-fenced, he said.
A report from the Interdepartmental Group for the Dublin Taskforce, chaired by the Department of the Taoiseach, had raised the question of not just ringfencing by the kind of project, but greater geographical ringfencing.
In particular, whether the levy should be spent not on services in the Dublin City Council area as a whole, but in the taskforce area at the centre of the city.
It could "be ring-fenced for investment in the geographical area relevant to the Taskforce Report and Roadmap for Delivery, notwithstanding the Council’s prerogative on expenditure decisions", it said.
It's unclear if that's still on the cards, or not.
McGrattan, the Sinn Féin councillor, said that the tourist levy is still going to be controversial in some quarters if it comes in, and what the council spends it on is likely to be closely watched by the hospitality industry.
He wouldn't want any row over how it is to be spent to put the brakes on any levy, he said.
He would prefer a low-level to begin with to make sure, as the international evidence suggests, there's no negative impact on visitor numbers and spending, and then the council can adjust as things develop, he said. "You don't want fewer tourists coming in and that negative effect."
He, Pidgeon and Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey – who together were to sit on a working group that never happened on the tourist levy with councillors from other Dublin authorities – agreed that they would want any tourist levy to be set as a percentage of the room rate, rather than a flat fee.
That seems fairer, said Pidgeon, the Green Party councillor. The more luxurious the hotel room, the more the visitor contributes.
Pidgeon said he is not a fan of too much ring-fencing of funds. "There are some exceptions," he said. But "in general, you should be allocating where they are needed".
Money raised shouldn't come with a connection to how it's spend, he said, and you're best having a democratically set budget.
But to get a levy over the line politically, proposers might need to ringfence it and show shared benefits to tourists, said Pidgeon. "In some ways, that's not the end of the world."
Said Lacey, a Labour councillor: "We are prepared to look at, what I've always called, mutually beneficial things. So things that benefit both Dubliners and tourists."
He recognises that any tourist levy would create extra admin for the hospitality industry, he said, so arguably they should see some benefit. But any notion that the tax would only be beneficial to tourists would be unacceptable, he said.
Across the city, social housing tenants struggle in poorly maintained homes – with draughts, with leaks, and mould worsened by overcrowded conditions.
Any tourist tax should be funneled to tackle that, says Stephen Curran, the public housing officer for the Dublin Regional Branch of the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU).
"It's crazy to me that this isn't the logical outcome," he said.
CATU has been running a campaign against the social housing rent hikes that came in with this year's council budget, said Curran. Hence, the motions passed at various council committees seeking a reversal of those hikes and exploration of other ways to fund the works – such as the tourist levy.
"This is all in the context of rent hikes in a cost-of-living crisis, and holding people's maintenance hostage," he said.
Councillors and council officials who backed the rent hikes did so with the rationale that they need to step up and improve housing maintenance, he said. "Why not do that with a tourist tax, rather than the people who can least afford it?"
How any ringfencing in the final law for a tourist tax is worded may also be key to this, said Curran. After all, how do policymakers and politicians understand the impact of tourism, and so ringfence spending related to this?
For sure, tourism brings benefits, said Curran, but some community impacts can also be negative. Land built out with hotels that could be used for housing, or homes converted to short-term lets, he said, or greater unaffordability.
So, "we would argue it should go towards those who live in the city, that work in the jobs that serve the tourists", he said.
McGrattan, the Sinn Féin councillor, says he worries that if the council uses any tourist tax for housing maintenance, it would just see that budget line from central government reduced.
Curran says CATU wants to see the central government stump up more more funding towards social housing maintenance, too. But if the choice is between raising rents or using a tourist tax, they would prefer to use a tourist tax, said Curran.
As Lacey, the Labour councillor, sees it, a problem with debate around the tourist levy is that it is being looked at in isolation. Not in a wider context of local government financing and powers, he said.
Consider that at the beginning of this year, the central government announced €718 million for roads, he said. Dublin got next to nothing.
The bottom line is that housing maintenance should be paid for by the state, he said. "It's a fundamental and essential public service."
Meanwhile, the reforms recommended by the central government's Local Democracy Taskforce in July, brandished as strengthening local government, are minor, said Lacey. "If you don't reform financing, and independent revenue raising, it's not really reform."
The Joint Committee on Drugs Use in June 2026 called for Section 3 of the Misuse of Drugs Act to be repealed – which it said would decriminalise simple possession of drugs for personal use.
The government published the details of its new Short-Term Letting and Tourism Bill last Friday.
The current regime just isn't working, she said.
Micromedia says it'll help spread the word about arts and culture. An objector says it'll be "yet another glaring, distracting, blinding and intrusive nuisance".
