Dr. Conor O'Toole:

I will follow up on a couple of points Professor McMahon made. Looking at where the economy is, the number of people employed in the construction sector and where there may be slack to bring more workers into that sector, it is clear that achieving all our aims across housing targets, deployment of infrastructure investments and investing in climate mitigation through retrofits, etc., involves a major challenge. Where are the bottlenecks in housing production?

From an employment perspective, there is little or no additional capacity in the Irish construction sector to increase employment at present because unemployment is so low in that sector. We will need additional migration into the sector as one channel to improve employment. We are in the early 30s in terms of thousands of housing units we are producing. There are 190,000 employees doing that. If we want to get up to 50,000 or 60,000, where are the additional employees going to come from? It will not all be through productivity increases. Even though we hope to get higher productivity, that will not fill the gap. That is a critical bottleneck.

The two issues I mentioned when I addressed this committee during the summer and the housing committee in June were infrastructure around wastewater and water connections, services and sites; and also the planning system and appeals system. There is ongoing reform of that. It is happening but we just have not seen it come through into action on the ground or into less friction in the system, which would enable more projects to get through quickly and reduce the cost that comes from the administrative structures around construction. That would be very welcome because those would be long-term structural changes to the system.