Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 1 March 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Challenges Facing Small and Medium Enterprises: Discussion

Mr. Shane Conneely:

Specific to the building one, the issue is that we work on incentives and we work on marginal effects when we are doing things like Project Tosaigh. I am not sure this is ambitious enough for where we are right now. When I suggest that the State would play a more active role, it is specifically with regard to needing X number of properties that it will buy and pay for as the State, then builders and those in the construction sector can tender for those particular projects, and those projects would be designed so that the skills development, which would be useful for across the sector, can be cemented in those builds. This is what I mean. Trying to do something at the margin when we have seen a very volatile marketplace for housing over the past 25 to 30 years, is not going to be that successful a strategy. It has proven not to be a successful strategy so I believe we need to do something different, more adventurous and more ambitious.

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