Lorcan Sirr: “We kind of turn a blind eye to what people have been doing over the years”

The Galway branch of the Community Actions Tenant (CATU) launched their campaign ‘Homes Not Holiday Lets’ on February 15, at Kennedy bar. They managed to raise 1550 euros and are planning more actions over the next months, in order to combat the negative effects of Airbnb and touristification in their community. Nonetheless, this is part of a bigger picture, since the lack of regulation on Airbnbs is a problem in the whole country.

Lorcan Sirr, a Senior Lecturer and housing police analyst at the Technological University Dublin, is an expert in this subject. He gave his analysis on illegal airbnbs and the housing crisis in general.

Diego Guevara: Most airbnbs in Galway are illegal, why is this happening?

Lorcan Sirr: Because you are in a rent pressure zone and you need planning permission and the vast majority of airbnbs in Galway don’t have a permission, so they are illegal. And there are three reasons why its happening. The first reason, we have a culture of not interfering with what people want to do with their own properties. So culturally and legally we kind of turn a blind eye to what people have been doing over the years. In the middle you have the likes of airbnb, these guys step into the regulatory gap, they step into the gap in regulation, pretending to be innocent and they masquerade self-interest as national interest. And actually airbnb is a huge industry in itself. And the third reason that we have is that you can make more money on airbnb that you can being an ordinary landlord. In one week, an airbnb in Galway, you can make what an ordinary landlord would make in a month. So you’ve got three layers, the cultural, the industry, and then you have the personal layer.

DG: Why isn’t the government more severe over this?

LS: You can have all the regulations in the world, but if you don’t sent anybody out to enforce it, the regulation just gets ignored. But the government bring in 2023 a bill to to regulate short term lets. And the European Comission said “no, we can’t do it”. And their problem was that it was a blanket ban and that it wasn’t spatial. So the European Comission, I thought they were out of order doing this, they were more interested in protecting the tourism industry. The government negotiate with them in fairness to the department they did bring forward the bill. So there is a new short-term letting bill, they are ready to go. Which my understanding is, it will require anybody who advertises on airbnb to get a license from Fáilte Ireland, and if you are in a rent pressured zone, you need to demonstrate that you have a planning permission before you can get that license number. So that’s going to do a couple of things, the government estimate it will bring 12 000 units to the market, out of 18 000 already on airbnb, 18 000 full time ones on airbnb. But also I think that it will drive a lot of it underground, because you can be sure that the vast majority of people on airbnb are not paying tax at the moment. And I said they are probably afraid that Fáilte Ireland might share data at some stage or revenue.

DG: Aside from this issue with airbnbs, which are the other main causes of the housing crisis in Ireland?

LS: I think we have been too friendly to international capital, international money. The government hasn’t been directly involved in housing as much as it should, in social housing and in affordable housing. These are all old problems that we know for years, they rely on the market too much.