Mr. Micheál O'Connor:

I am the group managing director for the Dornan Group. It is an Irish company headquartered in Cork. It will be 60 years old next year. We changed the ownership of the business in the past 12 months. We are now owned by a US company, Turner Construction Company, but we are still very much an Irish company and the way we have been.

We are a mechanical and electrical specialist contractor. We work primarily in the data centre and life sciences fields. This year, we will deliver revenues in excess of €1.2 billion. We have grown our workforce in the past two years from 1,000 to 1,500 direct employees. This year, we will deliver only 8% of our business in Ireland, with 92% of our business overseas. We work in the UK, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

For me, it is as simple as this: construction is a nomadic industry. You follow the work and go to where it is. We have done that since the recession. We went overseas. If we take our business in the UK, for example, it has grown tenfold over the past four years. That is primarily on the back of the UK Government designating data centres as critical infrastructure. We are delivering three hyperscale data centres in the UK at the moment, which is something we were not doing before but that was a Government decision that has considerably changed the market there for us.

On our capacity to deliver in Ireland, we are sending people overseas every week, a number of people who would like to be working in Ireland, who would like to see their families every week and so forth. We are headquartered in Cork where we have about 300 permanent employees. In Ireland, across various projects, I would say that maybe 40% to 50% of our people are Irish based but the rest of them are overseas. On the earlier points made, we are satisfied that if the pipeline of projects is here, we will deliver work in Ireland and we are capable of growing. We have grown considerably over the past two years and we are well capable of continuing to grow and meet the demand.

I have said this publicly in the past but the industry in Ireland is one of the best construction industries globally. I do not say that lightly. I say it because I have had the privilege and the opportunity to work with a number of international clients and companies and the Irish construction industry is well recognised for that.

We are fortunate in Ireland that we have had an FDI sector here for the last six or seven decades, and that FDI sector has trained companies like us and our contemporaries in a skill set around life sciences projects. That skill set that we take for granted in Ireland is actually not repeated in too many other countries. The proof of that is in the success that companies like us and others see when we go overseas and work in Europe and so forth and we deliver projects for multinational blue chip clients. One of the things that makes Ireland such a successful construction industry in our sector is that we have developed a skill set to deliver high-technology projects. We have developed the skill set to design them and we have designed the skill set to operate them. One of the things that really attracts those blue chip international clients to Ireland is reliability around delivery and reliability around certainty. We and our fellow companies deliver multibillion euro projects in Ireland annually. We do it on time, within budget and to the highest safety and quality standards. That is why our clients keep coming back. As a company, 90% of our business is repeat business. As an Irish company, when we deliver for those international clients, they see the benefit of our delivery and they continue to ask us to work for them.