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

We are speaking on the amendments related to short-term letting. What Senator Humphreys is trying to do with these amendments is the right way to go about this. Unfortunately, the regulation of online platforms in this area does not fall under the remit of my Department or the Revenue Commissioners. That does not mean that our work stops with the enforcement procedures we will introduce in the regulations once the proposed amendments to the Bill have been made. Short-term letting has to be a transparent activity if it is to work and to enable members of the public to find properties easily online.This in a way will lend itself to enforcement by our planning authorities. Dublin City Council has already been enforcing short-term letting to a degree but since it did not have the legal powers or the legal clarity, it was not in a position to do so as robustly as we might have liked. We are bringing that clarity forward in the legislation and the regulations as to what is and is not allowed. These authorities will be responsible now for enforcing these new laws. They will need new staff to do that and we will work with them to ensure that happens. As we begin these new enforcement procedures, like new laws, they will have to be kept under review to ensure they are working in the best way possible. We also have to recognise that what we are doing around short-term letting is being done through the planning code, which has happened in other jurisdictions.

This is just one part of it. There is a second tier to come, which is the regulation of the activity itself. We need to recognise that in the future, concepts around the shared economy will not go away. When the pressure comes off the housing sector, because supply will have increased sufficiently, we may decide three, four or five years down the line to loosen what we are bringing in here which is a prohibition on a second property being let in a rent pressure zone to the short-term market. Now is the time to start building proper regulation of the sector by bringing in the online platforms.

It is the case that Revenue can request the information it needs. Even if I thought there was a way of getting at this through my Department, I am reluctant to allow the sharing of the information between one party and another where it concerns a third party. That will need to be looked at more carefully.

As proposed in this House, we need to look also at activities not just around short-term letting but all lettings on online platforms, where certain platforms are allowing properties that are completely substandard to be advertised and let on their websites. They cannot say it is not their responsibility. That is not good enough. We need to move on that as well and we will work with Members of this House who have ideas on the activities of online advertising platforms to ensure they do not allow substandard apartments to be advertised on their websites, in the same way that there is a responsibility on certain websites not to allow certain comments or material to be posted on their sites. The same responsibilities should fall on private operators running websites that allow properties to be advertised that are not suitable for letting. That is further work we need to do but we are not trying to do it in this Bill. I accept that the motivation behind the amendments represents something that can be done but unfortunately it cannot be done through these amendments or the regulations that will follow.