Short-Term Lettings and Tourism Bill 2026 - should it pass?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The Hard Shoulder, with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman, on Newstalk, with Ciara.

Ciara Kelly (0:08)

We've been talking about it throughout the show. You may have heard us discussing it earlier, but a really impactful line from the CEO of Threshold, John-Mark McCafferty, we must end the absurdity of families in hotels and tourists in houses.

It is within the government's gift to return much needed homes to long term use by passing the Short-Term Lettings and Tourism Bill 2026 without delay. And he joins us now. Good evening to you, John-Mark. I suppose, lay out for us how stark the situation is in terms of short-term lets and long-term lets and the demand and the unmet demand that's out there.

John-Mark McCafferty (0:45)

Good evening, Ciara. Well, as you'll know, Threshold is Ireland's renters charity. We assist a lot of renters, our potential renters, and many of them are really struggling to find accommodation or alternative accommodation when they're faced with a tendency termination. If you take the case of Cork, and data from a data screen inside Airbnb, it shows that in Cork alone, there are over 700 full properties on the popular short-stay website, and that excludes hosts with only one listing, which could be their own private principal residence. It excludes other things like granny flats and yurts. That compares with figures by daf.ie for October 2026, which show less than 370 homes advertised to privately rent in the same area.

We're not completely comparing apples with apples, but it's as close as we can get in terms of the data, and that shows a ratio of two to one short-term lets against long-term rentals. I don't have to rehearse to your audience the abject lack of housing options for people, and that is no different in the rental sector, and that's for a whole host of reasons. It's not that short-term lets and the rise of them accounts for all of the reason why we have the lack of supply that we do.

Although short-term lets has contributed to this lack of supply, and as I mentioned at the top of your piece there, as you mentioned on my behalf if you like, that you do have situations where individuals and families are being housed on an emergency basis in hotels, and up to now because of lax enforcement, poor legislation, weak legislation up to now, there has been a massive rise in the number of entire homes being let through the short-term let platforms. That does have a negative impact on supply.

Ciara Kelly (2:49)

Okay.

There's so much to unpick in that. Do you think that if you were to claw back those short-term lets, those holiday lets, those Airbnb type rentals, that that would all, or have we any way of knowing what degree of it would end up in long-term rentals, John-Mark? The reason I ask is, we read this out earlier, it was a text or just sent this in. We don't know this person, but they sent us in. They said, I'm lucky I own a traditional Irish cottage. It's our holiday home. We never rent it out long-term as we use it ourselves regularly. But we do sometimes rent to tourists, and they absolutely love it and the location is stunning. Are we doing something wrong? We could leave it vacant, but by renting it out, it means some money for us. It's good for the house to be used and good for local rural businesses. Should we stop doing this and be penalized? And I suspect there's lots of people who are Airbnb type hosts, would identify with that story.

John-Mark McCafferty (3:43)

Well, I suppose people who've been running holiday homes for generations and for many years, should continue what they're doing and will continue what they're doing. What we're talking about is the recent rise, which has been facilitated by online platforms in the last five years, 10 years, whereby homes that, some of them that would have gone to long-term rental, were placed on short-term rental instead.

And for example, research published by the government's own housing agency found that almost 17,000 short-term let's entire homes. Now, we're not talking about a room that's being let in someone's home that they live in. We're talking about entire homes, 17,000. We're operating in areas of very high housing demand in Ireland, in urban areas and other areas where, say, the rent pressure zones are in action.

Ciara Kelly (4:35)

And I fully appreciate it. You're not going after people who are renting out a room for a few extra quid and I don't think anybody would want to. But how do you differentiate between somebody who has a holiday home that they use themselves, but they might rent it out for some weeks during the year to other people and whom, if you stop them from doing that, it will simply lie empty for longer. So tourists won't be able to use it, but no one else is getting it either because they're not going to be. Well, I suppose there are people who are texting us saying they don't want to be landlords. They don't want to be forced to be landlords and they're not going to be. And if this change comes about, the tourists won't get their Airbnb house, but neither will anybody else.