“Airbnb and other letting platforms could face millions of euro in fines in Ireland under new rules,” the headline said. Don’t bet on it.
The General Scheme of the Short Term Letting and Tourism Bill, published on Thursday, is looking to more tightly control the use of homes for short-term holiday lets in the midst of an acute housing crisis.
Not so acute that Government has not dithered in putting manners on both landlords and platforms, like Airbnb, Booking.com etc, mind you. Tighter rules were supposed to come into force as far back as September 2022.
Under the new system, every property advertised on a short-term letting platform offering stays of up to three weeks will have to be registered with Fáilte Ireland, with details including Eircode, in return for a registration number that must be included in any listing.
That will allow Fáilte Ireland ensure everyone is compliant with planning and, the authorities hope, bring as many as 10,000 homes back into the long-term rental market.
So far, so good.
Anyone listing without a registration number can be fined and so can the platform. But this is where it gets interesting.
Originally, the plan was that platforms would be hit with a €5,000 fine per breach. It was a simple, clean mechanism but one that was seen as incentivising the platforms to ensure rogue listings would not appear.
Under the plan as published, the maximum penalties could be much greater – up to 2 per cent of turnover. But the process is convoluted and seems destined to become an unworkable bureaucratic mess.
First, a three-person adjudication panel needs to be put in place, which may set up oral hearings and the taking of evidence – really? – after which it must follow a rigid and cumbersome decision-making process.
And at the end of it, any financial penalty can be appealed. Not to the District Court, where costs can be contained but to the already overburdened and very expensive High Court.
In a week when Taoiseach Micheál Martin said the State needed to find a way to get “investigations done more quickly, more effectively” than the five-year average for tribunal and investigations of inquiry that have cost taxpayers almost €600 million over the past 30 years at an average of €22 million apiece, it seems absurd to be putting in place a structure that could cost more than it ever brings in to the exchequer.
Do we really want to replicate what the Taoiseach called a “deeply unsatisfactory” process? Talk about taking a hammer to crack a nut.
