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

Co-operation is key and it happens across many aspects of Government, because life does not fall into the silos of Government Departments. I could not risk any unnecessary delays, as there have been enough already, and I had to progress with the planning laws, as per my responsibility. I knew I could do that within a certain time horizon.

On enforcement, a breach of planning laws is very serious. People need to understand that they will be in breach of planning laws where they are not engaged in home sharing but in a short-term letting. Much of the work will and can be done on the desktop in terms of how we enforce this.

In regard to those who seek to step outside of this, I will look at this very carefully because the property still needs to be advertised online. Even if a company approaches an individual and says that it can get around this, in order for that individual to be able to identify a site on which to rent, it has to be online for this to work. That would, therefore, be a route for us to be able to identify those properties seeking to step outside of this. There are also other methods where an address may not be registered publicly online but that will not stop us from engaging and in trying to get addresses. We will, of course, need to review this and to ensure that enough time is given to see how properly this is working. To give an example, if we had reviewed the operation of the Rebuilding Ireland home loan scheme after six months, most people would have said, as they did, that it was not working, whereas we knew it was working very well, and more successfully than anticipated. We will need to have a period of time to get a proper understanding of exactly what is happening before we engage in a formal review.

Like most things we are doing in housing now, we are constantly looking to ensure that the changes and improvements we are making in law are having the intended consequence. I appreciate the amount of work the Senator has done in this area since he entered the Seanad, and I will be happy to see this legislation passed today. I will bring the regulations to the joint committee next week to be ready for 1 July when the new laws will take effect.