Mr. Liam Kenny:

I am the managing director John Paul Construction. We are an Irish-owned and operated business headquartered here in Dublin. We work across Ireland as well as the UK and Germany. We work across most sectors of the industry, from residential infrastructure to data centres and life sciences, mainly funded through foreign direct investment here in Ireland over the past number of years. We employ 700 people across those geographies. We are a diversified, privately-owned business and we have had to diversify. If you go back and look at the construction industry and the cycle that has occurred over the past 20 years, we were boom-bust and started to climb again.

As a private business, to be sustainable, move forward and grow our business, we had to look abroad, particularly so in the past number of years where we saw a decline in foreign direct investment in the country - life sciences, data centres and technology projects. We had a gap to fill. We thought that gap would be filled by infrastructure and residential projects here in Ireland. That drove us to look further afield to make up for that revenue. That is what has driven us to look further afield for work to fill our pipeline.

In response to the question around resources and the number of people it will take to fulfil the ambition of the national development plan, I do not think anyone can dispute the reports the Central Bank or the ESRI have published. I am not in a position to do that. In the here and now, those reports may be correct but I do not think any contractor is going to have a stock of people waiting in the wings hoping that a project will start. What is the spend going to be next year? What is the detail of the project? Will there be projects in 2027, 2028 and 2029? If that information was available to us in a structured fashion, we could plan and resource. We are in a world where our businesses are defined by projects. Projects start and finish. People come back from abroad. We want to be working here in Ireland but definitely, over the past number of years, that growth in the Irish market just has not happened. If we could get visibility - it is all about visibility - on a pipeline and the types of projects and spend, I would not be worried about the resources.