Mr. Pat Lucey:

Deputy Lisa Chambers raised a point close to my heart. When we talk about civil engineering, we talk about roads and bridges but it is a people industry. We are all about people. We produce brilliant construction people. Thankfully, we got a lot of really good engineering professionals, quantity surveyors and architects back to the country when we started picking up again a couple of years ago. Deputy Lisa Chambers mentioned the west of Ireland. We have some great people back from Australia and New Zealand who wanted to be back and work in the west of Ireland. They wanted to have the quality of life that the west of Ireland gives. There was a gap for a number of years where engineers stopped coming out of the colleges in the numbers we normally had before. When work started picking up, we found that there was a countrywide shortage of engineers with two, three or four years' experience because we stopped producing them as a country. What the contractors did at that stage to encourage more people into it involved picking graduates, running graduate programmes, setting them on a four-year course to chartered status and giving them a very concentrated training routine. This has produced great benefits. The worry we now have is that we see the pipeline drying up. Unfortunately, when a pipeline relating to public infrastructure dries up, it cannot be restarted overnight. What has to be done is the small money on planning, deciding routes and deciding the form of transport, which does not have to be roads but can be rail. We need to improve connectivity for our people.

Deputy Eamon Ryan is correct. We cannot really build more roads in Dublin to improve it but we need to go underground. The metro and the DART are needed. Those types of projects need to be accelerated. Yes, we will lose a certain amount of time but if we look at the models that are available and if we take early contractor involvement as one, that can knock three years off that eight or ten-year cycle to get through planning about which the Deputy spoke. Done correctly, we can knock time off that. We need to do that now in order to restart that pipeline. Unfortunately, it is not an overnight solution and as one of the other Deputies said, when a problem arises, the easiest thing to cut is capital spending.