Mr. Niall Byrne:

The short answer would be "yes" in the sense that the world has been changing and whether all our institutional arrangements including the RTB have changed alongside that. The reality is they have not. The world moves along and organisations are not always, probably rarely, moving at the same pace as the external world for many reasons, even though we would all wish it were different. There is always a lag. I believe a transition is happening for the RTB. It is under some pressure. We talked about that today. That is not because people in the RTB are not concerned about high performance and high quality service to the public. The organisation has been striving to deliver that but against a very difficult background of long-term under-investment in the organisation in the past. In fairness that has been remedied more recently but probably because the RTB was not seen as a particularly important public body. It used to be much smaller than it is currently. The expectation, the demand, the role and the contribution have expanded massively. The organisation is struggling still. By this time next year we should have moved through some of that struggle but right now, for the past couple of months, we have struggled with some of those demands and expectations.

More broadly, as mentioned earlier the Government plans to commission a review of the private rental sector during the course of the coming year. That will be an opportunity for the RTB and many other stakeholders to engage in some discussion about what Ireland wants from the sector and what kind of institutional arrangements should be in the public service to oversee, regulate and provide high-quality data analytics based on high-quality information that is close to real time that can inform what we all wish to see, namely high-quality policy-making as a result. It would be good to think we might be on the cusp of that as many of us involved would very much welcome that and would be very keen to be part of influencing that change agenda.