Dr. Tom McDonnell:

We need an immediate strategy for inducing workers into construction. A lot of that will be about terms and conditions. There might be some pushback from the construction industry. Over the long term, one big strategy, which would require a fundamental rethink about how we do construction, is whether the State over the medium to long term can itself be a player, even if it is just subcontracting. Could the State be a big construction employer, in the sense of over the long term providing the jobs through local authorities for management and maintenance? That would make construction be perceived as a less volatile profession, which it is. It would induce more people to go into it if it was effectively a respectable public service job. It would not be a short-term solution, but over the medium to long term, with that in place, it would ensure we would not have one of these situations again. It would also put a kind of ballast within the housing market, which would give it a bit of balance over the longer term.