Mr. Derek Nolan:

Before coming back to Ireland to take on a role with Airbnb, I worked in Australia for Airbnb. We introduced a registration system in New South Wales. It decided what kind of a short-term tourism industry it wanted, what was good stock and where they want it. It encouraged farm stays and bringing people out of cities. It created a framework for all of that first. There was huge stakeholder engagement across the country. It spoke to short-term hosts, industry and the equivalent of ITIC and our self-catering federation, locked in that information and then introduced registrations to make sure everyone was abiding by the rules.

Talking about registration in the absence of deciding what we want is why we are at somewhat of a loggerhead. We have not decided what kind of a tourism industry we want. There are hosts all over the country. People have converted granny flats or built or renovated houses beside old houses on curtilage. These types of properties are showing up on Airbnb as entire home listings, but will never be long-term rentals. We need to solve that.

We talk about planning. The nub of short-term letting is that people try it out for a weekend and see how it goes. If that goes well, they then do it for subsequent weekends and perhaps a summer. That is how it starts. If there is a requirement to go to Galway County Council, fill out forms, pay money and speak to people, no one will do that in order to provide accommodation at weekends. We need to create a way for ordinary people to dip their toe in the water and see if they like it without having to go through the planning requirements.

If things get to a certain level, perhaps that could change. We need to make it easy for people to do it. If we want the sharing economy that everyone says they want, it has to be easy for ordinary people to do this. Navigating county councils, planning forms, putting up site notices and so on is difficult in the most normal of circumstances. It will strangle casual people participating in the industry.