Maeve McTaggart

This is another, I think, conversation.

There's a lot of deja vu around this, I think, as well.

This short term letting register, it has been mooted really for a number of years.

And there was really some pushback at a European level a few years ago.

But once James Brown came in as housing minister, he seemed to really want to pull this lever in his own language.

The point of the register is that anyone who's operating kind of an Airbnb style short term less would have to first register the property with Foil to Ireland as a short term less if it's being rented for a certain period of time in the year.

and also have the adequate planning permissions to do this.

And the point of this is so that hopefully some of these properties will be able to return to the long-term rental markets.

There was already quite a row, so to say, in government around some of the details of this.

In the end, they settled on the fact that this would only apply to towns with a population of more than 20,000.

The Killarney rule, yes.

You have to follow these new rules around the plan permissions and the register.

So exactly that, that's, you know, in the whole county of Kerry, who relies quite heavily in a lot of the tourist areas on these short-term lets, only Tralee falls under these new rules.

In Galway, it's only Galway City that falls under these new rules.

So it really seemed to take the teeth out of us in many ways.

Again, kind of seen as a bit of a success of a former junior minister, Michael Healy-Ray.

But,

And this week, this register that's supposed to be available now by the 20th of May, there are now question marks over whether or not it will actually be ready.

Yes, and it's a row that Tánaiste Simon Harris on Tuesday denied was ever a row and they're just teasing some things out.

But really, I think the argument with this is how long of a conversation has this been?