Mr. Leo Clancy:

The backdrop is that we are in an economy in which, fortunately, almost 2.6 million people are employed. I do not think that any of us anticipated that we would be in this position three years ago. It is a good place to be. However, it puts a lot of pressure on employers. Some of the skills that are hard to get always tend to be high-end engineering skills, whether that is in physical products, scientific products or technology, as we talked about earlier. Those skill are always hard to get. Notwithstanding difficulties with the tech industry, that is probably the most discernible area where there is a tightness in the skills market. Enterprise Ireland is more worried about a generalised labour shortage. In an economy in which there is full, or close to full, employment, we feel it becomes difficult for business. Anecdotally, we are hearing that it has eased somewhat over the past three months and that it is not having a negative impact nationally. We are seeing some easing with certain of our key clients, but we are still very concerned about that. We have a number of actions in place across our teams. We have a specific team that focuses on skills on behalf of our clients. We work very closely with, for example, the national apprenticeship office. We worked with it on its One More Job initiative to try to get more apprentices into as many businesses as possible. We provide critical skills data in respect of skills demand to our parent Department and to the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. We work closely on a weekly basis with agencies such as SOLAS, Skillnets and others to come up with strategies to help build skills. The short answer to Deputy Dillon's question is that a generalised shortage of available labour is probably the biggest concern we have and that we hear about from clients on a daily basis.