Ms M?ire N? Mhurch?:

We asked our members that question and we found that 77.5% said they would not go into the long-term rental market. There is a reason for this. Many of the owners are, on average, women over 45 years of age. Often, even for younger women, and I had two of them on the phone to me during the week from west Cork, it is part of their income. Because they are not working at the moment, it is part of their way of keeping stamps. That is what they are using it for and they were actually advised by their accountants to do that. There are multiple reasons for people to have the accommodation but they will not put it back into the long-term rental market.

We see a different situation in urban areas from that in rural areas. When there is high density, that is where the rent pressure zones are brought in. However, the whole of Waterford is a rent pressure zone – the whole county. I was in Killarney the other night and the area around it is a rent pressure zone. If you have a farm 11 miles out the road and it is part of your farm income, it is a rent pressure zone. Monday night was interesting because I found out that the planners in Kerry are dealing with planning legislation from 2016. The rent pressure zones came in for Dublin in 2019 without any support documents or guidelines and they then spread throughout the country. There was no actual tying-up of the legislation. That is the basic problem.