Mr. Mícheál O'Connor:

I am from the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland. While the Senator did not refer to our submission, I hope he had an opportunity to review it. While we deal with the construction sector, we did not deal with or recommend the issue of tax reliefs in our submission. Furthermore, we are not a lobby group. Ours is an independent professional body and the aim of our submission was to make recommendations. We fully empathise and appreciate the fact that the public coffers are dry or certainly very short of finance. What we are doing is putting forward recommendations to see how we can create an environment for both private and public investment in infrastructure. It is crucially important that we continue to invest, have the right skills for the workforce and professionals, roll out broadband in a proper format and have infrastructure that is attractive to international investment and multinationals which have been the bedrock of the economy for so many years. A CSO statistic we put forward in our submission is that between 2011 and 2021, 143,000 additional households will be created in Ireland. Regrettably, we cannot sit on our hands and must provide for and act on this. If we were not to invest for another four or five years, we would be very close to the time when these numbers would materialise and run the risk of creating another property boom. Certainly, that is not something anybody wants. The Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland did not recommend sustaining the boom because it was unsustainable. We recognised this, but what we are looking to do is to get back to a sustainable level of investment; create a sustainable construction and property environment; provide the right facilities to give our young people, workforce and professionals skills; provide the right environment for public and private investment; and maintain an attractiveness to foreign direct investment.