Mr. John G. Murphy:

I am the managing director of Murphy Group Ireland. We would export about 25%. The other 75% is probably broken down into 15% private and the rest is public. The public side would be water, gas and power. It is probably a lot of what we need at the moment and a certain amount of roads as well. We would have grown, the same as Mr. Kenny said, our export recently simply because of the ups and downs. Opportunities in water have slowed down so we had to go and put those people to work in the UK otherwise we would have lost them. Next year, I think, our turnover will be higher in export than it will be locally. We are part of a major group so we would have operations in the US, Canada, Australia and Great Britain.

To give the Chair an idea of the Irish business, I joined it in 2015. The business has grown about 20% a year every year. We are a direct-delivery organisation. This year, we passed 1,000 direct employees. We try to do as much in-house as possible. If you ask about the ability of the industry, I can certainly talk from the perspective of our own business. We have managed that growth every year through good and bad. If 20% of the 190,000 we employ at the moment is applied every year for the next four or five years we will easily pass out what is required.

The Chair asked where the people are going to come from. Some of them will be people returning home but we will have to attract people from abroad as well, which is going to be difficult because Germany and Australia are looking for people. Most western economies are spending on their infrastructure. The penny has dropped on how that is how we are going to sustain our growth in the future. All I can say is we have managed it in the past and we will continue to manage it on a yearly basis. While we have confidence, we will continue to that.