There is a particular kind of planning rule that exists mainly on paper. Since 2019, anyone letting a home for short stays in a rent pressure zone has generally needed planning permission to do so. Seven years on, the Department of Housing's own figures say that only about 1.3 per cent of short-term lets have ever applied. That is not a regulatory regime; it is an honour system that most of the people it covers have chosen to ignore. The Government's Short-Term Letting and Tourism Bill is meant to change that, but one feature of it risks turning seven years of non-compliance into a qualification.
The broad shape of the proposal is sensible. Planning permission for short-term letting would be restricted in 25 areas with populations of more than 20,000, including Dublin, Cork and Limerick. A national register, run by Fáilte Ireland, would require hosts to sign up from 1 December, which for the first time would give councils a reliable picture of where these lets actually are. Anyone who has tried to run an enforcement case on a short-term let knows that the hardest part is often proving the use exists at all; a register goes a long way towards fixing that.
The difficulty lies in the draft national planning statement that sits alongside the Bill. For short-term lets that have been operating for seven years, regardless of where they are, it proposes a presumption in favour of granting permission, provided the property has been in continuous short-term use and has not been the subject of enforcement action. Hosts in areas with fewer than 20,000 people would also have two years to apply.
Seven years is not an arbitrary number to a planner. It echoes the period after which, under our existing law, a council generally loses the ability to bring enforcement proceedings against unauthorised development. Read in that light, the presumption looks less like a loophole and more like an attempt to be consistent with a principle that already runs through the system: after a certain time, the State accepts that the moment for enforcement has passed. There is also a fairness argument. Councils did not have the information or the resources to pursue these uses, and some operators will have invested in good faith on the strength of that inaction.
But the comparison does not hold up well. The seven-year enforcement limit was designed to give certainty about physical development, not to reward a commercial use that was unlawful from the first night it operated and that has a direct, measurable effect on housing supply. The condition that no enforcement action has been taken is close to meaningless when enforcement has been so thin on the ground. Threshold has put the point plainly: permission has always been a legal requirement, and those who operated outside it should not be rewarded with longer transition periods. Sinn Féin has gone further, arguing that the restrictions would be among the weakest anywhere in Europe or the United States.
The stakes are not trivial. Analysis by the Housing Agency, cited in the planning statement, suggests that almost 17,000 properties are being used entirely for short-term letting in areas of high housing demand, and that somewhere between 5,500 and 9,500 could return to long-term use. In a year when councils, the Department and the industry are arguing over every possible lever to increase supply, that is a significant number of homes that already exist, are already serviced and need no new planning permission to be lived in.
My own view is that the register and the restriction in the larger urban areas should be welcomed and brought in without delay. The presumption for long-standing lets, however, should be dropped or narrowed sharply, perhaps limited to lets in areas where there is no evidence of housing pressure. Seven years of non-compliance should be treated as a problem to be solved, not as a track record.
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