Maeve McTaggart

And, you know, there's one side of this with the Department of Housing who want to return...

these properties to long-term use.

There's another side of the Department of Enterprise where they don't want to hurt the tourism sector.

And in between, you know, Simon Harris denied that there's a row going on at all.

But he said that this is government doing what government does.

I'm not sure really if I want to be attached to that.

You know, does government bring in the legislation in a timely manner?

Or does government, I suppose, need to once again, I suppose, sit down and

pass through this legislation that we had already planned to come into effect on the 20th of May.

I think that date now is a bit up in the air, but whether we'll come in before this tourist season?

I think government said that really they would want to make progress on this as quickly as possible.

I think it remains to be seen what the deadline on as quickly as possible is, whether it'll be at some point this summer into September.

It does at least seem to have, I think, re-sparked a conversation around this practice of character references.

You know, the Taoiseach, I suppose, didn't go so far this week as to say there needs to be explicit rule changes, but he said that he's always disagreed with this as a concept and that TDs and Senators should really refrain from doing it at all.

Similarly, you know, in opposition parties, Sinn Féin finance spokesperson, Piers Dart, he said during the week that Sinn Féin has long had a policy in place.

He couldn't say for how long, but that they've had a policy in place where

its TDs and Senators do not provide character references in these cases.

You have, you know, Aintoo, Leader Padder, Tobin would now like all of these parties to audit whether their own parliamentary party have ever provided character references to, in any sort of real criminal case, but particularly for the more serious crimes such as this one.

I think for observers of these elections, I think that there's definitely kind of a level of excitement about this.

It's kind of has become this conversation point now where people are really trying to get their bets in and trying to predict.