Politics by Numbers is a brand-new series for The Journal where broadcaster, author and spreadsheet stan Gavan Reilly takes a data deep dive into a political point of the week. 

THE PROBLEM WAS easy enough to identify. Since 2019, properties being let out for short-term letting on sites like Airbnb, for more than 21 nights a year, were considered to have changed their use – and thus needed planning permission to operate. What officials had found was that enforcement of that law was proving tricky.

The issue they’d found is that when you browsed listings on Airbnb, pinpointing the exact property wasn’t easy. The exact address or Eircode of a property wasn’t visible until a booking was made and paid; nor was it always apparent how many days per year a property was actually being filled – the greyed-out areas on a calendar might mean it was already booked, but also might simply mean the property’s owners were present instead.

Dublin, Ireland. Graffiti reading Airbnbs out now on hoarding on Shaw Street in Dublin today. Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie / RollingNews.ie

The fix they arrived at was a relatively simple patch. The websites like Airbnb could not be forced to act as policemen, making sure each and every property had the correct planning permission – so instead Fáilte Ireland would vet the properties, ensuring that they could only be advertised when they were legally compliant. Advertising the property online would only be possible, therefore, when the ad also included the Fáilte Ireland registration number.

Few will need convincing that the use of residential property for short-term letting is a major contributor to Ireland’s chronic shortage of long-term housing. Yet the time between announcing this plan and bringing laws to Cabinet plugging that hole is 1,854 days.

The question of why hints at something not-quite-right about how Ireland is run.

Unclogging the internal pipeline

The........

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