Mr. Gareth Redmond:

I thank the Senator for her question. I will give an example within her own constituency. I believe the north inner city local electoral area, LEA, is in her constituency. I have a list of all the LEAs from the ESRI report and roughly 6% of properties in the north inner city LEAs are comprised of short-term lettings. Given the high number of private properties within that area, the legislation would be quite transformational just for that area alone.

In terms of surprise at the numbers, as I said, there are different fluctuations of numbers because there is no publicly available data. The best we can do is data scraping, but what is quite clear is the number of short-term lets in certain areas, particularly in Dublin, vastly outweighs the number of those in the long-term market. That is why we think this legislation could be transformational, if that answers the Deputy's question.