Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for the follow-up questions. On the overcrowding point, I am aware additional accommodation has been secured for those working in the health sector who not only need to self-isolate but need to separate from the people they are living with because of the work they do. If the Deputy is aware of any case of someone who has not been able to secure this type of accommodation please let me know and I will make sure they get to the Minister for Health.

We will have a proper, fuller debate on housing in so many different areas when things get back to normal. Currently, to be able to get through one of the affordable schemes that we have, a couple has to be earning less than €75,000. If they are living in Dublin and are even in starter jobs, they are not going to be able to go through those schemes. That is why there should be an allowance for private housing, for someone to just buy without having to come through a local authority scheme on those big sites because there is room for it. That is the point I was making. On the housing assistance payment, there was a circular to local authorities on HAP and the different measures that had to be introduced in the crisis. I can have that provided to the Deputy after the debate if he has not seen it already. On short-term letting, we need to be very clear. As we had the debates around introducing the planning law changes to short-term letting, it was acknowledged by everyone that we also had to regulate the platforms. I was clear at the time that this was not a responsibility for the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government because these are tourism platforms operating online. We had to change the planning laws first anyway so that we had something to regulate. As I envisage it, one would be able to regulate the platforms in terms of what they are publishing on their sites, because they are responsible for what is being published on their sites if someone was publishing a letting that was in breach of the laws. If we move to that kind of arrangement, we might actually be able to loosen the stricter, broader planning changes that we made, so that we could have a more nuanced approach in situations where we have no short-term lettings, like in our city centres, but in the same local authority area could perhaps allow some short-term letting, if it is a very large local authority area. At the moment, the operation of the new restrictions on short-term letting is tied to rent pressure zones. It is a bit of a blunt instrument, if I am being honest, but it was necessary. If we could somehow improve that and have a more nuanced approach through regulation of the platforms as well, I think we would be able to keep those homes for our citizens who are living and working here but also make sure that some parts of the country that benefit from the tourism that comes from short-term letting will be able to continue to do so.

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