@Helen3
Sorry, I can't access the link so I don't know what it says, but I can assure you, the proposed legislation here is anything but flexible, and will wipe out small, hands-on, responsible hosts - many of whom genuinely do depend on their Airbnb income to feed their families and stay in their homes - in one fell swoop.
And yes, we certainly would agree that the STR market can't be allowed to grow unabated because of the impact in the communities in which it is based. It's a shame that Airbnb doesn't give a sh*t about trivialities like that though, as they concentrated their efforts over the past 2-3 years, in aggressively recruiting and onboarding hundreds of "professional" operators and commercial entities, with their thousands of unmonitored properties and their hordes of anti-social guests, to an already horribly saturated Dublin market.
Now it's the small hosts like me, Eimear and Conor who will pay the price for Airbnb's insatiable greed, while most of the big players in our market (the builders, developers, estate agents, foreign speculators, vultures and chancers) will remain untouched, by buying and bribing their way forward, in exactly the same way as they've done in almost every other jurisdiction where bans and draconian regulations have been introduced.
But hey, that's how Airbnb roll. Doesn't matter a d*mn to them who gets crushed in the process. As long as those figures are sky-high for the backers and potential investors ahead of the IPO, who cares about sacrificing a few hundred thousand little guys? A mere 500 commercials with vast inventories will plug that gap in an instant.
