Mr. Fergal O'Leary:

To perhaps give the committee some reassurance, the figures we have are based on screen scraped information, so they are not official data but are data taken off the large booking websites. These tell us that, at the moment, there are around 30,000 properties being advertised to tourists. The vast majority of those are not currently registered with Fáilte Ireland through our various quality assurance schemes and up to 70% of those are full houses and apartments, with about 7,000 of them “renting a room in my principal private residence”. The figure of 12,000 is an assumption based on what has happened in a number of other jurisdictions about what happens when one introduces a register like this, what happens to the number of tourist properties available and what happens to the long-term rentals. I cannot give the committee complete certainty over those figures. All I can say is they are the best available figures that allow us to indicate what may happen - they are the best we have at the moment.