Mary Regan

speaker

767 appearances 11 recordings 4 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 12 Sep

Mary Regan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Today with David McCullagh · The Gathering · 19 Jun 2026 podcast

But I mean, in fairness to James Brown, he has been pushing hard for this one for decades.

some time, but there's a lot of resistance, there's a lot of opposition.

I mean, first there were the TD's ministers and backbenchers representing rural tourism dependent constituencies.

So these rules were already watered down.

I think it was in February saying that they'd only apply to towns with populations above 20,000 people.

Now, that was important because it meant key tourism areas like Killarney, Kenmare, those sort of places were left out of the rules.

And I mean, if you look at the figures, a lot of those towns, I mean, for example, Killarney has...

You know, in the Irish Independent, we did a kind of analysis looking at the number of Airbnb rentals versus the number of long term rentals.

And if you look at a town like Killarney, it has 150 Airbnb rentals, but just one long term rental.

I mean, then Galway City, I was looking at it last night because Galway is the town that the rules will apply to.

And last night they had around 131 properties available on Airbnb.

Now, you have to imagine a lot of them will be taken up at the moment because it's now into the busy summer season and, you know, fewer than 100 to rent.

So, like, there definitely is a problem in accessing rental properties in areas where there's a high tourism demand.

But there's definitely a reluctance in government to plough ahead with these measures, apart from the housing minister who needs to, you know,

Free up more rental properties.

That's his brief.

And I think for that reason, they're being long fingered as much as they can get away with them.

And there was an expectation, by the way, that they'd be introduced by May for this tourist season.

But that's not going to happen.

Whether they are in place for next tourist season or not is another story.

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