Mr. Ciar?n Nugent:

The State is maybe half looking away and very well aware of the issues in that regard.

It is revenue from the State but it is clear that it is very unattractive as an option for younger workers. It is not necessarily that those opportunities are there either. If the State intervened and did what it did in the past, it could provide a floor in conditions in which the private sector would have to compete for workers and set out some kind of stable career path for people who want to choose it. There are plenty of people who want to choose that, who are incentivised to go to higher education now, and perhaps if the conditions were different they would not, especially in an environment of full employment where those opportunities should be easy enough to come by, the wages should be better, and there should be permanency. Even agency workers feature in construction. That also applies to retrofitting existing building stock.