Mr. Tom Dunne:

On the resources, I was happy, albeit unhappy on another level, that the recent budget has given the board an additional €2 million, although it sought €2.5 million. I certainly see a case for additional resources to be given to the board. I have reviewed the workplace plan for the board. It has expanded its roles in the recent past to the point where I expect it to be an issue that will face me as a chairman.

In the first couple of years when we were trying to set up a system to register landlords, PPARS was in the back of our minds. We spent a small amount setting up a rudimentary system to learn how it would operate. The board has a great deal of intelligence in respect of how the system would operate. As I understand, it has a programme - RTB 360 - that will implement a new management system. I have some concern about its introduction because I share the Deputy's view that whenever one starts touching IT systems, they can be problematic. I will have to keep an eye on the matter in the future.

On the issue of co-living, the commission spent some time examining circumstances where people shared houses and examining the relationships between them. Often, a tenant had let somebody stay in a room and maintained his or her position as a tenant, but what was the status of the other person - a tenant or what else? It was a form of co-living. The formula in the Act is curious in that regard because the tenancy is the tenancy, and people become licensees within that tenancy and then can become enjoined to the tenancy. It is quite complicated and is probably often ignored, although trying to legislate for it is complex.

The licences and other contrivances that people raise to try to keep tenants out of the agreement have to be examined in the particular case that presents before a dispute resolution. I am sure it will happen that somebody will take one of the licences to the RTB. The disposition of the courts in the past was always to penetrate that and determine the nature of the relationship. If it was one of landlord and tenant, and if the written wording used between the parties was a contrivance to avoid the reality, adjudicators and the courts usually found such a contrivance was not acceptable. Such an arrangement was found to be a tenancy, or what it claimed to be. To some extent, that will have been an amelioration of the matter and there will doubtless be a few court cases relating to it. When people live together in other forms of accommodation such as student housing, where they share a great deal of the accommodation, it becomes problematic because the legislation deals with a dwelling, which is defined as being capable of being lived in independently. The co-living experience might cause some concern and may lead to some review of the issue.

I do not know how it will go. It is a very small sector and I am not sure it will grow to a size where it becomes a problem. It will always be a niche sector.

On the question of the move to rental, the Deputy made a good point about something I was trying to point out earlier. These Houses, and the parties in it, must think about housing more broadly. They need to sit down and look at the shape our housing sector will be in ten or 15 years hence. They should take a view through the cycle and into the future. We can use economic instruments to influence how much home ownership there is in society, how many people will be in the private rental sector and what we want in the social rental sector. We can influence that through taxation, the social welfare system, traditions and the situations with which we all live. We must think about this issue. Maybe all the parties can get together, sit down and think about it. I was part of a group of people who got together approximately a year and a half ago and we all said that the housing situation needs to be solved. We recognised it as an acute problem and saw the issue of its cyclical nature. The conclusion we came to was that there needs to be a collective view on how we manage housing. I will talk to Deputy O'Brien about that again.

It should be remembered that the role of dispute resolution was taken from the courts and given to the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB. That was a significant change because there is a question mark over the issue of administrative law and whether the State can create entities like the RTB to carry out functions that might be seen as the bailiwick of the courts. There is always a tension between these Houses and the courts. The formula that the Act came up with was that of a determination order, DO. The intention behind it was that if the courts had confidence in the board, they would accept the DO. The board established that in its first years and that enabled the Legislature to move the enforcement of DOs from the Circuit Court to the District Court, which makes it much easier to do.

It is a complex area. My own disposition is that the DOs should be enforced by the courts and they should not look behind the issues. That is a confidence issue. It is important that the RTB retains the confidence of the Judiciary because otherwise the whole scheme under which it operates could fall apart.