A planning rule that almost nobody obeys is not really a rule at all. For seven years, planning permission has been required to use a home as a short-term let for more than 90 days a year. According to figures the Department of Housing gave to a committee, only around 1.3 per cent of those properties had applied for that permission by May 2025. Of the applications made, 186 were granted. Put plainly, the regulation existed on paper while the market carried on as if it did not.
This week the Government finally moved to close that gap. The Short-Term Lettings and Tourism Bill was introduced in the Dáil on Friday. It gives effect to an EU regulation on short-term rental data, makes Fáilte Ireland responsible for a national register of short-term lets, and provides for fixed payment notices against hosts and financial sanctions against online platforms that break the rules. Alongside it come new planning regulations that will stop councils in areas with more than 20,000 people, including Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway, from granting fresh permissions to convert homes into short-term lets.
For planners, the significance lies less in the ban than in the register. The existing rules failed not because they were badly drafted but because councils had no practical way of knowing which properties were in breach. Enforcement in Irish planning is complaint-driven and thinly resourced. An enforcement officer cannot be expected to trawl booking websites, match photographs to addresses and then build a case strong enough to survive in the District Court. A mandatory register, with platforms obliged to share data, turns an invisible problem into a list. Once a council can see which addresses are being let and for how long, the planning question becomes straightforward.
The potential prize is real. Housing groups point to more than 1,200 short-term listings in Galway held by hosts with more than one listing, against a little over 200 homes advertised for long-term rent in the county. Even if only a fraction of those properties returned to the long-term market, that would be housing delivered without a single planning application for new construction, in places where new building is slow and costly.
There are fair counter-arguments. Tourism in the west and south-west depends heavily on self-catering accommodation, and hotel capacity outside the cities is limited. Some hosts will argue, with justification, that they are letting rooms in homes they live in, or seasonal properties that would never suit a long-term tenant. A blunt ban in every larger town risks treating those cases the same as investors running a portfolio of city-centre apartments. There is also the question of whether councils, already short of planners, will be given the staff to act on what the register reveals.
My view is that the balance favours the new approach, provided two things happen. First, the register must be live and complete quickly, with data flowing to planning authorities as a matter of routine rather than on request. Second, councils need dedicated enforcement capacity for short-term lets, funded centrally, so that this work does not compete with every other complaint on an enforcement officer's desk. Without those, we risk repeating the experience of the past seven years: a sensible rule, widely announced and quietly ignored.
The lesson reaches beyond short-term lets. Too much Irish planning policy assumes that writing a rule is the same as delivering an outcome. Monitoring and enforcement are planning functions too, and they deserve the same attention we give to plan-making and development management. If this Bill succeeds, it will be because the State finally paired a rule with the means to see whether it is being kept.
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