Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Ó Broin for bringing forward this Bill, which we support. When in Dublin there are 2,700 Airbnb short-term lets being advertised but only slightly over 400 long-term lets, we know the Government's policy is failing yet again. Despite some efforts being made to limit or regulate this area, they just have not worked.

Those who are pursuing profit from property are simply ignoring the rules, and we do not have a regime to do anything about it. These measures will at least attempt to address that problem. I refer to forcing estate agents or platforms that advertise short-term lets to at least try to establish whether they are within the planning regulations. I refer also to the establishment of the power to issue spot fines to those that do not do so or that offer short-term lets that are not within the law. I agree with that.

We need to go further, however, because there is an emergency. This House agreed some time ago that we have a housing and homelessness emergency, but we just do not act accordingly. The Government most certainly does not although it pays lip service to it. An emergency means you do unprecedented things to address it. Not doing so is obscene and immoral in the teeth of this crisis. If we had a functioning housing sector and did not have 10,000 households in emergency accommodation, 20-year waiting lists for social housing and rents and house prices that the vast majority of working people cannot afford, we could operate in a different way. However, in the teeth of the incredible suffering that people are going through, we need emergency measures. Deputy Cian O’Callaghan is right that in the epicentre of the housing crisis, there simply should not be short-term lets available. They should not be allowed when we need people, including families and children, to be housed properly.

Let me raise the case of a woman whose case I have raised many times. Hers is one of many cases but I am referring to it again because I received a text from her today. She told me how her youngster, who is 11 years old, is now seeing a psychological counsellor to assess the impact on his mental health and his trauma because the family is three and a half years in emergency accommodation. She has been thrown off the housing list because her income is too high. She is not even entitled to the housing assistance payment now and her child is being damaged. That there are others making money out of short-term lets when this family needs a place to live is just obscene. We need emergency measures. If we had a functioning housing sector in which the State had built a sufficient amount of public and affordable housing, we might operate in a different way; however, in the face of an emergency, you have to do unprecedented things. We need to start doing them. Short-term letting should not be allowed, full stop, in the areas where the housing crisis is focused, which is in the major urban centres, including Dublin, Cork, Waterford and Galway.

Seeing as we are talking about advertising, let me highlight something else. The development up in Cherrywood really drives me insane because it is the biggest residential development in the State. It is basically a new town. The State put in the Luas. The site is off the N11 and millions of euro have been spent on infrastructure. For a brief period, the development was in public hands, in the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, but we flogged it off to developers and speculators. Finally, more than a decade later, housing is starting to appear there. There are apartments and so on. An outfit that was drawn to my attention this week – Hali, which has offices on Mount Street – is advertising studios for €1,500 and single-bedroom apartments for €1,800, going up from there. They are not exactly cheap. It gets worse, however. With regard to Cherrywood, two people came to me this week. Both are working and on reasonably decent incomes. One, a young woman, is earning €3,000 per month and does another job for which she earns another €500 or €600. The other, a man, is in the same boat. The two emailed Hali and said they wanted to rent one of its apartments. Hali said it was pre-approving them. Later, after months of emails, they were told they were progressing brilliantly, that it was all looking good and that they should just send in their bank documents, and this and that. At the end of the process, however, this crowd just turned around and said it was not giving them the apartments. There was no explanation whatsoever and the people affected are absolutely gutted because they are so desperate. They looked up one of the directors of the company and saw that, in a tweet or post, Hali referred to how it was very glad to be doing work with big corporations to house their talent in some of their apartments. It is a new twist to the housing tale that the apartments are being let en masse to big corporations that gazump ordinary individuals who have been engaging in good faith to try to rent them. They are gazumped because the company is interested only in money. That is the problem with our whole housing policy. Irrespective of whether short-term lets or this kind of behaviour is in question, these companies cannot be let dictate what happens in our housing sector and the availability of rental property. The State has to dictate.

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