Mr. Seanie Lambe:

What made the 20% social housing strategy comparatively successful was the fact that it was tied directly to the planning permission. Having experienced it and studied it over the past few years, the only hope we ever had of getting the 20% local labour was if it was tied to the planning permission. What we found early in its application is that builders were able to bid more cheaply to developers and go in with lower tenders on the basis that under the Lisbon treaty they could employ people from Lithuania, Turkey and elsewhere and bring them here to work at wage rates that were operative in those countries. It enabled them to make lower bids and it was difficult for us to negotiate the 20% local labour clause with them.

That was only in the building phase. The jobs at the end of the projects are more important. Even very few of the jobs that do not require a high level of education such as security, cleaning and so on go to local people these days. They are not advertised through the local employment service and it is hard to see them, although someone in the paper connected with the American chamber of commerce mentioned that for every ten jobs created in the IT sector, seven subsidiary jobs are created locally. That might well be true but they are not going to our people and that is very obvious.