Colm Burke (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Regarding all these plans for what needs to be done, one of the issues that is not being dealt with by any Department is the workforce requirements for delivery. If we look at the building industry at the moment, its workforce is way below the numbers we had in the period from 2000 to 2008. We cannot deliver a whole lot of projects without having the workforce in place. I do not see any Department dealing with that issue. We have talked about training more apprentices and so on but I am not clear that enough is being done to respond to this issue, which we will need to do if we want to deliver on the whole area of building, retrofitting and all of that. I have spoken to people who applied to the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, for instance, and it is only two years later that they are getting a response because of the workload the authority has. Departments need to look at that issue. It is grand putting everything that needs to be done in a plan but there is no point in doing so if we know full well it cannot be delivered without a workforce.