Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)

I thank the Chair and other committee members. I am not a member of the this committee, but the topic is close to my heart. I have been to some of its regional meetings in Munster. I read the opening statements.

Most of my questions are for the short-term letting representatives, but I hugely admire the work of Threshold. My office engages with it regularly. I thank Threshold for all the advocacy work it does for people in homelessness and facing homelessness. It is a pity that sometimes in the media, the two entities present are pitched against one another because Threshold does hugely valuable work, yet short-term letting is also valuable. I do not see short-term letting as the fix to all this.

My position on this has morphed over the years. Three or four years ago, a political colleague showed me a website insideairbnb.com, on which there is a map of Ireland and it is possible to zoom into counties, cities, towns and localities. Very quickly the user will see an incredible dataset of properties available tonight for short-term letting. The figures suggest that we could instantly solve homelessness by enticing or forcing all these properties over to long-term letting. I fully bought into that. I said we had to legislate for this and make it happen. I was then contacted, as TDs often are, by lots of people who provide short-term lets. They said they were counted in those figures but that I should come back the road to see what they had in west Clare. I saw everything from beautiful retro caravans to tents, wooden huts, shepherds' huts, granny flats and - I did not travel to it, but we all saw - that incredible Boeing plane in Enniscrone, County Sligo. Therefore, I noticed the figure did not tally with what we had all been thinking and I adopted a diametrically opposed position that this would not work and we should abandon these plans. Then, approximately nine or ten months ago, there was a refining of the rules, that they would apply to towns with a population of 10,000 or more. We got a bit of detail, but the detail does not seem to have evolved any more.

Like Deputy Dolan, I would like to think that a city or town centre apartment block or dwelling would be available for families, but I have a very different view on the property in the west, down some peninsula or rural road, that is providing a tourism commodity and is available throughout the year. It is regrettable that in all that journey, the detail that was needed has not been clarified to any great extent. It is bad that we still do not have planning detail. The registry is definitely needed because only when we have it, will we know the yurt from the house and the cottage from the other thing.

I do not know whether the committee will produce a report on this body of work. However, vernacular buildings, like the old Irish cottages that for decades were tumbling into the ground with thatched roofs falling in, were becoming relics and ghosts of the past. I can see all over the countryside, as I read in Ms Piner's opening statement - I must look up her property because it sounds fabulous - that people are bringing back these very old vernacular structures. They are beautiful and fabulous. They are lime rendered, but in 2025 - forgive me if I have misrepresented Ms Piner's property - most of them are not capable of housing a family with modern needs over a 12-month period with the harshness winter brings. The view we, in government, have been developing is overly simplistic.

If all that has been proposed so far were to come to pass, would Ms. Piner, Ms Cahill and Ms Cronin-Falvey still find a way through the planning system to operate short-term rental or would they just pull it and let their short-term rental sit idle at the side of their houses?