Mr. Roland O'Connell:

On the jobs front, the Deputy will be glad to hear that on the property side of our business, jobs seemed to have stabilised and this year there was an under-supply of new graduates. There were more jobs than there were graduates and one of the reasons for that is employment fell sharply and people went into different business, emigrated or whatever, but now things have stabilised. We are getting this message across to career guidance teachers and parents to encourage them to get their children to consider the property sector as a job for the future because they tend to spend three or four years in college. While the construction industry has not stabilised yet, it is getting to that point. We have had a huge loss of skills but we need to start getting people back into that sector in order that we will have people with skills in the future. We are quite optimistic about the future of the country as a whole.

The Deputy asked about measures to create employment. We believe that currently there is outstanding value in the construction sector but we do not believe the State is necessarily approaching this from the right direction. One of the reasons is that the public tendering process seems to concentrate solely on the lowest tender and in recent years people have been awarded contracts for which they tendered below cost and when their businesses have then collapsed that has created a mess. We need to examine the public procurement process, how we can do that more efficiently and we need to speed up the process. What would help in that respect is if the Government across all State sectors had a chief construction adviser who co-ordinated all of those elements. Mr. John Moran, the Secretary General of the Department of Finance suggested we examine creating a centre of excellence in Dublin for both property and design skills - construction skills - because we have built up a huge level of talent that we can export. Many of these people are going abroad to work and we need to support that export of skills where they can be based in Ireland and do work abroad. There are sectors in which the Government can help with that and we have covered that in our submission.

In recent months, we have seen the benefit of investment in strategic construction projects. By that I mean things like the National Convention Centre where a couple of weeks ago the International Bar Conference was held. They brought 5,000 lawyers from around the world who used hotels, restaurants and taxis, all of which generated money for the local economy. The American football match in the Lansdowne Road stadium had the same effect. When there is such good value in the construction sector we should take advantage of that, be it investing in broadband, transport or other long-term infrastructural skills. How do we do that because we have no money? We could get private pension funds to invest in this sector as well as getting money from the National Pensions Reserve Fund and the European Investment Bank. One of the issues in getting money from those entities is that private pension funds are worried about the construction risk of investing in something at the nascent stage before it is built. That is a hurdle we have to overcome. How do we bridge that risk gap for them? If we can do that we can then see construction which will create jobs and have a long-term beneficial effect for the State.