Dr. Kieran Feighan:

I will address the Deputy's comments on master planning and Ms Spillane will comment on skills shortages. We echo his comments on the need to have an overall view of what we are doing in every town and city in the country. While local authorities and the LDA are important in terms of the delivery of housing, which is the key issue for this committee, the provision of infrastructure with housing being only a part of that is even more important. There are three elements to this: where people live, which is what we are considering in terms of housing; where people work and the other services required in terms of education, health, recreation, culture and so on; and how we link those areas together. We have an affordability problem because, to a large extent, the location of our services and jobs and where people are living are not co-ordinated. It is important to understand that. The fear in regard to the provision of housing is that because we have a deficit and it is seen as an emergency, we may make the same mistakes again. As land becomes available, we prioritise the development of those projects for housing even if they are not sufficiently co-ordinated and pulled together from a sustainability point of view in respect of transport links to health, education and so on services. We need to pull back and review our planning. Local authorities have a role at this level. We have regional oversight but we also need national oversight. Engineers Ireland has consistently called for a national infrastructure commission or a strategic infrastructure unit that examines all of these issues and not simply housing. We very much echo the points made by the Deputy on pulling together all of the aspects of infrastructure.