Dr. Conor O'Toole:

Yes. It is clear from the research we have done in the NDP review and which colleagues in the Central Bank did at the end of last year that it is a major challenge with the resources available in the economy to double our housing output. We are doing approximately 30,000 right now and we want to get up to more than 50,000 units per annum. That is a major capacity challenge, for both the labour inputs and how we produce them. There will have to be a range or basket of measures that will help contribute to that. One is the standardisation of the modern methods of construction. The more we can adopt these pro-productivity-type production processes and the more units we can get per unit-labour input, the better it is going to be. We will be on a much clearer path to achieving the targets.

There are other industry-specific issues which have also been raised, such as the scale within the sector. There are many smaller firms in the Irish construction sector and in a sense, because of their size, they do not have economies to scale. This means their labour productivity and general productivity cannot rise as much as larger firms, which can get those economies to scale. Having larger firms, especially if we can attract some foreign construction firms into the economy, to help with both infrastructure and housing can be a positive.

On the labour shortage, I have not done any specific research into visa programmes like that but if we have a specific deficit in a particular skill set in that market and there is a challenge to finding that domestically, we have to find that labour somewhere because we need to produce these houses. I do not have any specifics on that but certainly, policies that would bring the right type of labour into the economy would be welcomed from a construction output perspective.