Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The witnesses are very focused on his Department's involvement in it which makes it difficult to assess the overall impact of the scheme. I will put the questions anyway. Firstly to pick up on Deputy Donnelly, it is surely not beyond the wit of man to have a 15 month extension instead of a 12 month extension. Let it get to the end of the academic year as it will need that kind of certainty for people.

Regarding the fair deal scheme, as we increase the percentage disregard, my question is whether we are pulling on the correct policy lever as we increase the amount of disregard and now it is going to zero. Have we seen more and more properties within fair deal come into circulation to be rented out? Anecdotally, and you should never base policy on anecdote, that does not seem to be the barrier. The barrier seems to be that you have to go in and empty your parents house to get it ready for rental rather than the considerations we are dealing with here. If we are pulling at the correct policy lever I would have expected to see a change in uptake as we progressively made those moves. In respect of the barriers to rent-a-room - and this is responding to a conversation that I have had with people in student unions - it is not clearly explained what the minimum expectation is in terms of the rights of the person coming into the house. It is a different situation from renting out a house where everybody should have a clear expectation of what is involved and there is the RTB etc. that is supposedly there to regulate it.

I am hearing from students who do not have locks on the doors of the rooms they are going into or the expectation is that come 12.30 p.m. on a Friday they will be out for the weekend or there are limits to their rights to use the kitchen or the bathroom, these kinds of things. While we are providing this benefit and saying this €14,000 does not affect your disregard or whatever else, are we setting the ground rules? Are we saying "you are getting this benefit and as a quid pro quo we expect people who are taking up that room to have certain minimum rights within the household". I would worry that we do not have the same protections in relation to the people coming in to rent-a-room as we would have for renters, and God knows those could be a lot better. Similarly I am not sure there is a clear expectation of what happens from the householder's side if the arrangement goes wrong and what protections are there.