Dr. Ronan Lyons:

I will try to go through those questions Deputy by Deputy but there are some common themes as well. Deputy O'Dowd spoke about a single person in the city centre to whom the landord says that they can either pay 60% higher rent or that the landlord will move to Airbnb. This ties into a point he made about the increase in hotel stock. To some extent the short-term letting sector could be blamed for it being an option for the landlords to switch to short-term letting, but that sector could be taken away completely and the landlord would still be able to say the exact same thing. If a rent of €1,000 a month was being paid a few years ago, a landlord can now ask for €1,600 a month such is the imbalance between supply and demand. That is why I made the point about scale. I am not accusing anyone here of having thought that short-term lettings were the entirety of the problem, but when we think about solutions we could easily imagine a situation where there were not short-term lettings in Dublin and that landlord would still be able to say the same thing - that the rent is going up 60%.

The main reason is that we have a rapidly growing population with changing demographics and preferences to such an extent that there is huge demand to live in apartments in the city centre. The census figures indicate that there are about 250,000 one and two-person households in Dublin but only about 125,000 dwellings that would suit one or two people.