The estate agent said that they would send someone round tomorrow and I had to calm them down.
Come in two weeks, I told them, because the builder boyfriend is still painting the hallway with the yellow paint I don’t much like any more because it’s taken so long.
The new laws leave us paranoid about having anyone step foot in our house for longer than three weeks
They love selling these old country piles in Ireland because they change hands so often it’s a licence to print money – not for the owners, but for the agents who keep selling them year after year, after the owners have not been able to afford to keep them going.
Usually, it’s the lack of plumbers and tradesmen, but now there is another problem. The Irish government is bringing in a law restricting who can do Airbnb.
I couldn’t make head nor tail of the new regulations, except to see they are bound to be another chilling example of how socialism follows the law of unintended consequences. So I registered for an Airbnb webinar where the company would explain it.
The idea the Irish government seems to have had is to declare ‘rent pressure zones’, and to try to restrict the ability of home-owners to do anything with their spare rooms and annexes other than renting them out to people who need somewhere to live permanently. So a new registration scheme is coming in this spring to license Airbnb in Ireland – and potentially other countries if the idea spreads like socialist contagion usually does.
Worse still, with separate legislation that has just gone through, the government is also restricting the ability of homeowners and landlords to evict a long-term tenant.
Those renting accommodation get a guaranteed six-year tenancy, with very few grounds for eviction.
It’s mind-boggling, and the regime is clearly aimed at relieving the state of all responsibility to build or offer affordable housing. By forcing the homeowner into long-term renting and making eviction almost impossible, the government is effectively attempting to give the private citizen the job of resolving the housing crisis for them. The whole thing sort of adds up to a land grab. It’s nationalisation of private property in all but name. But of course, neither the BB and I nor anyone else in their right mind is going to stop doing Airbnb and start renting a converted barn, for example, to a long-term tenant who can never be evicted. We’d rather sell up. Consequently, the new regime will simply take countless holiday lets off the market while not expanding accommodation for homeless people.
The new laws leave us absolutely paranoid about having anyone set foot in our house for longer than three weeks, which might constitute a long-term let.
I think back to the strange Kiwi who booked for a month and arrived from Wales with a carload of possessions, including four huge pot plants and a desktop computer, and who then began to demand access to all areas and asked whether she could move into the barn when we finished it.
She was one of half a dozen strange people who, under the guise of being on holiday, have tried to move in with us since we started doing B&B. It’s terrifying.
On the evening of the webinar, we had our dinner with the laptop set up on Zoom on the kitchen table, and at half six two cheerful Irish chaps appeared on the screen and introduced themselves as Airbnb public policy managers.
They began by marvelling that the webinar had 1,900 householders all over Ireland logged on. Presumably, like us, they couldn’t work out how they were going to pay their oil and electricity bills if they couldn’t carry on doing Airbnb.
And like us they had absolutely no intention of taking in permanent tenants who might refuse to pay and resist eviction under Robert Mugabe-style rental laws.
One of the men explained the new regime, whereby you have to apply to the Irish tourist board, Failte Ireland, for a registration number, which you must then give to Airbnb before the end of May if it is to keep you on its site.
The problem came when they tried to explain what now constituted an Airbnb in your principal residence, and what might be considered a commercial bed and breakfast, if the government checked up on it, and what might be considered something that would need a fresh planning application made to the local council for change of use. Basically, we were all about to be showered with a deluge of red tape and regulatory check-ups.
The questions poured in. Were yurts all right? What about annexes? What about barns?
But the worst bit of all was when they revealed the government had not yet got the registration website up and running, so – with the season starting and everyone already hosting customers – there was no way to check whether your home was eligible.
The questions poured in. Were yurts still all right? What about annexes attached to your main home with an interconnecting door? What about barns? What about…
The answer seemed to be that everything – every yurt, teepee and tent that was being offered to tourists – would need a registration number, and that probably meant they would also need to go through the full planning process to ask for formal permission to be there, which might take the best part of a year. The managers told us to go ahead and honour our bookings in the meantime, and they promised they could find a way to legally not suspend our listings beyond the registration date for bookings already taken.
But you could see the nearly 2,000 people online dwindling in numbers as more and more logged off.
The problem with all this is, if you’re going to be Marxist, you need to be efficient about it. As things stand, it feels like thousands of converted garages, barns, tree houses and beach huts will close for business across Ireland this summer.
Whether a country house in West Cork manages to keep hosting vegan eco travellers who want every kind of pretend milk for breakfast remains to be seen.
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