Legislation to regulate short-term letting is before the Oireachtas, with a Dáil debate expected and new planning guidelines due to be published alongside it, The Irish Times reported this week in a report by its political correspondent, Cormac McQuinn.
Under the guidelines, planning permission will generally not be granted for new short-term lets in towns and cities with more than 20,000 people. The restriction covers 25 urban areas, among them all of the State's cities and large towns including Drogheda, Dundalk, Swords, Navan, Bray and Ennis.
Smaller tourist towns, Killarney among them, are not covered. The threshold was set in February, when the Government dropped an earlier plan to apply the restriction to towns of more than 10,000 people.
Alongside the planning rules, operators will have to register their properties with Fáilte Ireland. The register was originally due to open in May and was pushed back; it now opens for applications on 1 December.
Only a property with planning permission to operate as a short-term let may be registered, and a valid registration number must appear on any advertisement for the unit. Operators must obtain the number before advertising, and seasonal advertisers must register before listing. Planning authorities will have access to the register's data when deciding whether to open enforcement investigations.
There are exemptions. No planning permission is needed where the let is the applicant's own home and either the host continues to live there or, when the host is away, the property is let for fewer than 90 days a year.
Where a short-term let has operated without permission and no enforcement action has been taken for seven years or more, the owner must apply for retention permission. The guidelines create a presumption in favour of granting it where the planning authority is satisfied on a list of criteria, including that there is no serious traffic, flooding or pollution risk.
In the urban areas above the threshold, permission for short-term letting of a property that is not a primary residence may be granted only in limited cases: where it would help retain, reuse or preserve a heritage building, or where the unit occupies the vacant upper floors of a mixed-use building. In both cases the building must be unsuitable for longer-term residential use.
In towns below the threshold the policy is more lenient. Operators have two years to meet the planning requirements and may register in the meantime.
The scale involved has been estimated. A report by Indecon for the Housing Agency found almost 17,000 properties in high-demand areas used entirely for short-term letting, of which it judged between 5,500 and 9,500 could return to long-term residential use. The Minister for Housing, James Browne, said: "We have far too many full houses being let out on a short-term basis", in areas that are at the same time experiencing serious housing shortages. The register will also bring European Union rules on collecting and sharing short-term rental data into Irish law.
The rule can be stated more plainly than the guidelines state it. Whether a town may acquire new short-term lets depends on how many people live in it permanently.
That is a workable test, and it has one feature worth drawing out. A town's protection is a function of its resident population, which is the quantity that short-term letting is said to reduce.
Follow it through. A town of 20,100 residents is restricted. Should it come to hold 101 fewer, it is not, and the guidelines would then permit the new lets that the loss of residents has just made room for.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has looked for the mechanism that interrupts this and cannot locate one. Population is counted. Permission is granted against the count. The count is affected by what the permission allows.
Killarney is the clearest case in the reporting, named as one of the smaller tourist towns the restriction does not reach. It is a tourist town below the line, so the figure that decides its exposure to short-term letting is the number of people who are not tourists.
Our analysts note the one reading that makes the scheme entirely consistent. The 20,000 figure is not a measure of housing pressure. It is a measure of how many residents a town must keep in order to be prevented from replacing them.