Mr. Niall Byrne:

That has always been the case. I have been involved in this work for many years in different environments. The good operators always want the regulator to deal with the people who are giving everyone a bad name. I am conscious of that because there are so many decent people - all our data support this - who most of the time do the right thing by their tenants. One of the frustrations we have is that the RTB is not currently properly authorised, with the right kind of regulatory powers, to regulate the entirety of the sector. That would involve substantive change from the current regime, but in circumstances where, as I say, it is much more akin to an essential public service, the argument for seeing it as a public rather than purely private matter is well made.

We can all remember when private nursing homes were regulated in a hands-off manner by the State. Then a particular case gave rise to a public scandal and that whole area was reformed from a regulatory standpoint in quite a dramatic way. I became responsible for the regulation of private nursing homes under the revised framework. The Health Act 2007 did something interesting. It said that all operators of residential care had to register with the regulator whether they were private, public or voluntary. I grew up in a local authority house in Carlow and my parents were renters in the 1950s. They were happy to get a council house in Carlow in the 1950s. I still wonder why people who live in local authority housing do not have access to the benefits that come from the RTB.