Ms Kathryn Ward:

I do not have the interpretation of that in front of me.

With regard to student accommodation, when I came to the RTB first in 2004-05, we always took it that private student accommodation was within our remit. We had many registrations for student accommodation. Students brought cases to us. Over the years as a different model of student accommodation was being built and provided, things started to change.

Perhaps landlords entered into different agreements with the individuals but the view could be that it is an apartment. It may be that it is a three or four-bedroom apartment, but it is one tenancy with three or four people in it. If people take cases to us through our disputes resolution procedure, we would look for that agreement, not the title deeds, and look at the substance of that agreement and how it works in practice. While somebody may say that he or she is going to move an individual on the first of every month, the question is whether he or she does that in practice. If not, then it is a bad term within that tenancy agreement. This is why we would encourage cases to come before us.

Wearing the registration enforcement hat, again we are looking at providers of student accommodation and seeking to find out why they are not registering. When they say they do not have to register because it is a licence agreement, we do the same with these as we would do with every other landlord who says it is not a tenancy but rather it is a licence. We ask them for a copy of the licence. In that way we can then look through that and if we are of a belief that it is not a licence, we engage with them on the grounds that it should be registered.

I would not come from a background of thinking that they are just licences, but with all of the confusion around it and the new models of student accommodation that are being provided, it is a question of having the correct definition in legislation. We would have to look at the definition that Deputy O'Brien was talking about and see whether it suits the purpose.

As regards student accommodation, Senator Murnane O'Connor spoke about somebody only getting a nine-month lease, but it depends on what people sign up to. If they sign up to a nine-month lease, it is a nine-month lease. The one thing to remember with student accommodation is that it generally suits students to get the nine-month lease because then they are off for the summer. What happens then is that the individual comes back the next year and the only provision that does not apply to students is security of tenure. This means that after a student has done three or four years in college and has got a job with Ericsson or whoever, he or she cannot stay on in that accommodation because we would end up again with very little student accommodation being available. The only difference between student accommodation and regular tenancies is that a person does not have that Part IV right to stay on.