There is something quietly absurd happening in Irish accommodation right now. Across the west of Ireland, residential properties are hosting tourists on Airbnb while hotel beds in regional towns are occupied by long-term residential placements, including emergency and refugee accommodation. Houses built for families are full of visitors. Hotels built for visitors are, in many cases, no longer available to them. We have inverted the entire logic of how accommodation is supposed to work.
The Government's new short-term letting register, due to launch on the first of December, is a serious piece of legislation. Anyone offering paid accommodation for stays up to 21 nights must register with Fáilte Ireland and prove planning compliance. Towns with more than 20,000 people face a December 1 deadline. Nationwide compliance follows by year-end, with a two-year transition for smaller settlements.
The logic is clear and defensible. Operating a property as a de facto hotel without planning permission is a breach and should be addressed. Property ownership carries rights but also obligations.
But the legislation misses something important, and the wider debate misses it too. The reason so many residential properties drifted into the short-term market is not bad faith. It is rational behaviour in a market that has failed to provide adequate tourism accommodation, particularly in rural and coastal areas. Along the Wild Atlantic Way, through Connemara and on the Aran Islands, tourism demand is real and sustained. The professional, purpose-built accommodation to meet it has never been sufficient.
In many regional towns, hotels that should have been part of that tourism infrastructure have been out of the market for years, some for the best part of a decade, repurposed for other accommodation needs. That further tightened the supply of visitor beds across North Galway and the wider region. When hotel supply contracts and tourism demand continues to grow, the market finds an alternative. The alternative it found was the residential housing stock.
You cannot address that by criminalising property owners without first acknowledging the supply failure that made their decision rational. What Ireland actually needs is more hotels and purpose-built tourism accommodation in the places where visitors want to stay. The Wild Atlantic Way is one of the most recognised tourism routes in Europe. Galway is internationally known. The visitors are coming regardless. The question is where do we expect them to sleep?
Build sufficient hotel capacity in the right locations and the commercial incentive for informal short-term letting diminishes on its own. The market rebalances. That is a more durable outcome than a compliance regime that depends on enforcement capacity local authorities have consistently struggled to sustain.
None of this is an argument against the register itself. Transparency is reasonable. If it surfaces genuinely illegal operations in high-pressure urban markets and returns some properties to long-term rental, that is a benefit worth having. But for the west of Ireland, the problem has a different shape and demands a different response.
Property owners in this region deserve policy that reflects their situation fairly. The right to let your property is a legitimate one. The question the Government should be asking alongside this register is simple: where are the hotel beds needed along the Wild Atlantic Way, who will build them, and what supports will make it happen? Answer that and the short-term letting problem begins to solve itself.
Enforcement alone is not strategy. For more visit www.fairdealproperty.ie
Johnny Gannon is the founder of Fair Deal Property Auctioneers and Estate Agents. For advice on buying, selling and developing contact 091 394593.
