The Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy has said the short-term rental market here may drop off for the foreseeable future because of the coronavirus.
He said he wants to see regulations to stop former short-term lettings returning to platforms like Airbnb.
Many short-term lets have been placed on the general market as tourism has dried up because of the pandemic.
However, there are fears that when things return to normal they will be once again withdrawn from the rental market.
Minister Murphy told Pat Kenny this could see the end of the short-term rental market here.
He also said he believes that rents will continue to fall as a result of the global crisis.
It comes after figures show rents saw their biggest one month fall since early 2009 last month.
There was a 2.1% fall in rents between March and April.
Dublin was the exception, where rents were on average 3.6% higher in the first three months of 2020 than a year previously.
The average listed rent is now €2,074, up 107% from its lowest point in 2011.
Nationally rents fell by 2.1% on average in April compared to March, which Daft says reflects the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
On this, Minister Murphy said: "Rents were falling before we came into this crisis, but I think it's clear that they're going to continue to fall.
"What we've seen with the short-term letting sector - with Airbnb and others - is what we already knew: that there were a number of apartments in our cities and large towns that were being lost to tourism when they should have been here in the long-term letting sector for people working and living here.
"And we made changes in the law around that last year, just in middle of last year they came through.
"But the second stage needs to be regulating the platforms as well".
"The homeless services in Dublin have done a fantastic job in grabbing some of those early, and putting in place contracts so that we could get people out of over-crowded homelessness into less over-crowding, more self-isolation, more room for cocooning.
"And that's been great for now, for the pandemic, but there's a longer term picture here which needs to be regulating these platforms, so that all of these homes - which effectively were operating illegally - don't get to go back to the short-term letting sector.
"And in fact, there may not be much of a short-term letting market for the foreseeable future because of travel habits changing.
"And so there's a great incentive there to be getting it back into the long-term leasing sector in any case".
