I strongly doubt Airbnb has anything to do with it. The idea seems ridiculous, especially for Dublin. From what I've seen, Dublin suffers from a chronic lack of

I strongly doubt Airbnb has anything to do with it. The idea seems ridiculous, especially for Dublin. From what I've seen, Dublin suffers from a chronic lack of government planning and spending on housing and general urban planning; has a sizable part of the population that lives and has lived maybe for centuries in serious poverty, helped (and kept quiet) by the dole; it's a tech hub in a tiny country with a formidable capacity of attraction of tech companies and skilled workers, who inevitably compete with the natives for housing; but being small, it's not flexible enough to accommodate the amount of immigrants, and it's very sensitive to boom and busts: rents are now 2.5 times what they were in 2009. Many council houses are horrific in build quality and lack of maintenance. Developers, in the (apparent) complete lack of planning are incredibly greedy, and happily destroy any existing building in the city centre to replace it with brand new, extremely expensive ones. At the same time a lot of old/ historical buildings in the city center are left empty and rotting, amid wastegrounds closed by iron fences and barbed wire. Ireland's culture seems to me a strange mix of great heart, fatalism, happy go lucky attitude, greed and complete inability to plan the future. Check this: an Irish comedian around 2008, when the crisis hit Ireland and the properties prices crashed: https://youtu.be/ZD9R1LMM5Zs https://youtu.be/ZD9R1LMM5Zs