Mr. Conor O'Connell:

Attracting people back is a key focus of ours. We visit schools all of the time. We visited 65 schools in Cork city and county, including in Deputy Gould's constituency, to illustrate that people have come back into the sector. We brought quantity surveyors, carpenters and others into schools such as the North Monastery Secondary School in Cork to illustrate the careers that are available. Do we have enough? No, we do not. Do we need more? Yes. We see in Housing for All the figures that show we need thousands of extra workers, including 2,500 extra carpenters and 2,000 extra electricians. We are doing our best to recruit people but we are in what people who work in human resources or HR call a war for talent and like every other sector we face manpower challenges.

In 2016, we completed nearly 10,000 units. In 2020, with not much of an increase in the labour force, we completed 20,000 units. The industry has the capacity. Sometimes I feel there is a misunderstanding of the link between manpower issues and capacity. We find that our biggest capacity constraints come from within the system.

I assure members that we able to deliver. We have stepped up and we are getting there. We have had three years of constrained supply due to Covid restrictions, yet we still managed between 2019 and 2021 to complete 20,000 units while the industry was shut down for a significant period.