Professor Peter Clinch:

That is a good point. One of the big lessons of the big boom-and-bust cycle we have just completed is that sustainability is the important word. I mean that in a broader sense as opposed to environmental sustainability. I mean it in the sense that we want to ensure the wages we are paying ourselves in the jobs we have at the moment are sustainable and not temporary. It is really important that our cost base does not get out of hand. If we are a high cost economy, we must have high productivity growth rates right across the economy and not just in certain areas with low productivity growth in other areas.

For example, we are embarking on an enormous investment in capital infrastructure yet we have very low productivity levels in the construction sector. We also have a booming construction sector. We need to try to square that circle of how much value for money we get from our capital investments. It is a difficult time to be investing in capital although we need it in order to be able to grow without prices rising. It is a very difficult thing to do.

It is important for the National Competitiveness Council to point these things out and make these contributions to the various Government frameworks such as the Action Plan for Jobs in the past and now the Future Jobs Ireland plan. Our record shows that in the past five years we have been very clear in underlining the vulnerabilities we have on costs and productivity in particular. We have also done considerable research on housing and rent affordability. We developed an index allowing people to see how affordability in our cities compared with other cities; that did not exist previously. In the end we produced a study to examine the affordability of Irish housing.

We came out strongly on childcare costs as we discussed. We came out particularly early on legal services and on insurance. We also raised the awareness of the high cost of credit and not just availability. We have also got cost and competitiveness included in areas of Government policy where people might not have thought it was an important strand. For example, competitiveness is one of the pillars in the White Paper on energy even though it had not been when it emerged in the first instance.

We also were involved in the implementation group of Food Wise 2025 and we called for competitiveness to be an important part of it.

On national infrastructure, we have heavily focused on coherence, co-ordinated delivery and monitoring of both the national planning framework and the Government's capital plan. We need to properly assess how we prioritise investment and there needs to be a decision making process on how to change course if something changes. If an enormous international economic recession comes along, we need to be able to ask if we are investing in the right areas or if we need to do something different. Agility in decision making is critical. In the national mitigation plan we have emphasised the need to competitiveness-proof the key areas of climate and energy. Our emphasis on productivity was raised by two Deputies and has been taken on board by Government in its future jobs plan. It is important to make sure the plan is effective and is delivered.