Mr. Paul Kelly:

There are a number of points there and I will try to race through them. We welcome all the greenway development that is going on and we are working closely with our colleagues in the Department of Transport and the various local authorities to ensure they are as good a visitor experience as they possibly can be. We are in a period of transformation of the cycling infrastructure in Ireland. We are coming from a point where we were well behind international competition and we are now rapidly catching up and hope to pass them out, if members will pardon another pun. There is significant development going on at industry level with cycling providers. The Deputy is right that e-bikes transform the cycling offering because people of completely different abilities can now cycle together, and that is a transformative change in the industry. We are working with many providers to help on this. Many of them are part of our digital that delivers programme. This gives them significant investment to help them get online, become bookable, get visibly international and get their own businesses up and running out there. The Deputy mentioned the Hidden Heartlands. In addition to the likes of that greenway, the just transition funding of €68 million Fáilte Ireland has secured will transform the overall offering, so it is an exciting time for the Hidden Heartlands with respect to the development of tourism in the region over the coming years.

On the self-catering point, there is nothing in the legislation or the proposals we are working on that will, in and of itself, limit the provision of self-catering accommodation. The legislation is seeking to deliver the registration and the visibility of that. As to how many providers will continue to provide short-term accommodation versus becoming long-term residential housing, that would be a planning matter for local authorities. It already is. The issue is the current system does not give local authorities the visibility in terms of what people are using their properties for. We need the legislation to give that visibility. Fáilte Ireland has done a lot of work over the past ten years to try to encourage people to register and to try to make it as easy and cheap as possible to voluntarily come onto the Fáilte Ireland register, yet we still have tens of thousands of properties that are not registered. We need the legislation in place to put an onus on both the property owners and, critically, the platforms to get the level of visibility the Deputy is talking about. If we do not have that, we will be back here in another year, or five or ten, and we still will not know how many such properties are in the State. We will be screen-scraping and trying to make estimates etc. as opposed to actually having a register. We need the legislation in place to get the visibility in order for the area to be managed. The specific two-step approach the Deputy spoke about is exactly what is built in. We have always proposed a six-month clarification period that would give both property owners and local authorities time after initial registration to clarify the planning status and what is required etc. As Mr. Ó Lionáin said, his Department and we in Fáilte Ireland have liaised with the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage to discuss the importance of trying to recognise in any planning guidelines the areas that require tourism accommodation and to ensure properties that are not in any way suitable for long-term residential purposes are not forced out of the tourism market.

The UN principles on the development of sustainable tourism state tourism must be developed in a way that is cognisant of the needs of the wider community. We need to understand we are developing tourism in the context of a residential housing crisis. Also, if a property that was built and had planning permission to be a long-term residential unit is being used as a short-term tourism let, then that is not fair on the neighbours. This especially applies with apartment blocks and so on. It is important tourism be developed so it is consistent with the needs of the community in order for it to be sustainable.