Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

From the information we have retrieved, and we picked Dublin, typically most people visiting Dublin are coming on a city break for between three and five days. However, people can holiday for a week and sometimes two weeks. By going to 14 days we are preventing that activity from happening. There are a number of other types of short-term stays which we would not wish to exclude, such as executive letting. A company might control a couple of properties where the executives let them out. A person coming to work in the company might arrive there and use it as a base for a number of weeks before he or she finds a home to rent for a year or two. We also know from talking to people in the Department of Health that if somebody is undergoing a particular type of surgery, the person might have family come to live near the hospital where it is taking place. The family might do that for three weeks, a month or longer. We do not wish to exclude that. Obviously, there is also the situation, which was flagged to us by the RTB, where somebody renovating a property might have to vacate it for a month or a longer period of time. That must be allowed to occur.

The 14 days allows us to tackle short-term letting as we do not believe people are short-term letting for 15, 16 or 17 days, and if they are it must be 0.01% of activity, but it does not then unintentionally capture all those other lettings we want to allow to continue.