Mr. Ian Talbot:

Commercial real estate issues around the country are not coming up as an issue for our members. It does not mean there are not some issues out there but the three big ones that keep coming through are housing, the cost of services such as energy, and skills. I do not think there was any mention of the National Training Fund yesterday. We still have this locked-up concept. I am not sure why it got locked up in the first place but we desperately need to unlock it and spend it on skills training. Skills is such an important issue. The pace of change in the market is just so fast. It is faster than it was a year ago, with AI for example. Potentially, people joining the workforce now may have to retrain several times during their career, so we need to focus more on skills than we ever have before, including retraining people, on-the-job training and so on. It is a real concern that we did not hear much yesterday. The investment in Skillnet next year is buried in the detail. I think I heard it might be down for next year but it is in the detail and I have not got to it yet. We are all looking forward to seeing how the Limerick mayor works out as well, to see if it can be a good model for other towns and cities across the country. That is important. We would like to see it succeed.