Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There are a couple of other points that are worth clarifying in this debate and I want to see what the officials think. Capacity constraints are being mentioned quite a lot. A major factor, possibly the major one, is labour and skills shortages. The officials might accept it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. I met a group of teachers today who said there are loads of people out there who want to be teaching and that we have a shortage of teachers, but because teachers cannot get permanent posts and people cannot afford to live in Dublin on the earnings they will get as a teacher, they are leaving the country. That is a chicken-and-egg situation, because if we do not give them decent wages and do not give them housing they can afford, all of which require spending, then they are going to leave and our capacity constraints and labour shortages get worse. We must address that problem. Again, maybe we need fewer people working on building luxury yachts, which I am using as an extreme example, and more people working in our schools to educate our children because that is a prudential investment in our society. Is that a reasonable observation?