Mr. Gerard Brady:

I might come back on the labour market side. There are a number of things in that. There are about 170,000 people in the construction sector broadly at the moment. That will need to grow in the coming years. We are doing work, which we will share with the committee, that looks at the scale of the investment targets. We will update it once we have the new NDP in July, or look at the scale of investment needed. We will need in the realm of 100,000 extra workers in that sector over the next decade to reach the targets in public and private. That is growth in the economy plus the green targets that we have set and the investment needed there. The major investment is in the national development plan, the various commitments across Government and the plans for rail and everything else. Many investment needs are coming down the line.

It is the right thing to do for the economy but will need a concerted effort to build capacity. Several areas are important in building capacity. The one we hear about over and over again is trust in the pipeline being critical. We have even talked to companies abroad that could bring capacity into the economy and start to build here. Going back to the motorway network, many of those roads were built by foreign contractors. We could bring in capacity for a lot of jobs or bring back capacity in respect of Irish companies building abroad using Irish workers, but they need to trust the infrastructure funding is there and if there were to be an economic downturn, the funding would continue to be there. In terms of the money put away in the various infrastructure funds in recent years, we now see the signal coming out of them in terms of backstopping infrastructure, the new NDP and the associated dedicated funding, the use of the Apple money and how that is outlined. This will be very important in sending a signal to Irish contractors and contractors abroad. We have a great deal of capacity in the form of large Irish engineering companies and companies in the construction sector generally that are undertaking projects across Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere in the world that could do more here, especially on the large engineering projects side.

On the housing side, there probably is a two-tier aspect. Lots of companies say they are not operating at capacity at all and could do more with what they have in housing, especially if a commitment were given on modern methods of construction and using this in the social and affordable housing area. There is a commitment in the programme for Government to move towards having a minimum amount of this type of housing constructed using modern methods of construction. This would create a pipeline which would mean those companies could invest in using more of those modern methods of construction. It reduces the labour need. In both cases, there is a need for the kind of trust that the system will prioritise infrastructure and investment funding to ensure companies can then build towards something. We do not have a track record that is great on this aspect, so the messaging in this regard and the funding is very important.