Dr. Ronan Lyons:

That is a fair point. It raises a second point that came up in some of the contributions relating to how we classify people in short-term lettings. Deputy Ellis mentioned a register. In Ireland, in general we are bad at having registers of things. We do not have a register of who owns what. We have a partial register, but we do not have a complete one. The ones least likely to be in there are the empty ones. We do not have a register of who lives where and do not have a register, for example, of what is catering to tourist demand, however broadly one might define it, versus catering to commercial need or permanent residence.

As Mr. McCafferty said, without the information, it is not possible to make fully informed decisions and we are poking around in the dark somewhat. This also deals with Deputy O'Dowd's point about vacancy. Probably the single best thing the country could do to lower the vacancy rates would be to set up registers of who owns what and who lives where. Then it would be possible to have these empty-homes officers or inspectors who figure out if it is a fair deal house. I have just moved into a house which I would say was empty for four years. At no point was it cynically empty; it was just because various bits of the fair deal process and legal process took too long. They did not need to take that long and therefore it was empty for too long. Until we get the information to understand why they are vacant, we cannot take the right kinds of actions.

Deputy Casey spoke about the increase in the hotel stock, which I touched upon briefly. When those hotel rooms come in, I believe it will take some of the Airbnb demand. I still think there will be a segment that wants short-term lettings. However, it comes back to the original point that the demand for apartments, particularly in Dublin, is so strong that removing that entire chunk would not have a major effect. This city needs 4,000 or 5,000 listings a month so adding 7,000 hotel rooms - I am switching between scales here - would equate to a maximum of a couple of months of rental demand; it is that bad and that is just Dublin.

Deputy Ó Broin spoke about postal areas 1, 2, 7 and 8, which ties into the same issue. Mr. McCafferty made the point that the problem here is not the short-term letting segment, per se; rather it is the really poor supports for people in need of social housing. I used to live in Stoneybatter and know it reasonably well. People in that area might even be squeezed out for Airbnb - potentially we could come up with a rule preventing those becoming Airbnb. If they are in rental, they would still be squeezed out by people on higher incomes. There is no support to keep them where they are in a market where rents have increased by 60% or 70%. The underlying issue is that we gave up on certain models of social housing support and we have not adopted sensible ones to replace them.