Mr. Pat Lucey:

We have exhausted the live register fairly well with respect to workforce issues, but we are still working on it. We are still having success through different training courses with getting people off long-term unemployment and into construction. Going forward, we will have to bring more workers into the industry from among school leavers. However, we will also have to look at the technology. Off-site construction has become very prevalent internationally but we are getting into it more slowly in Ireland. We have people who are willing to do it, but it comes back to that awful word "confidence". If people want to set up a fabrication plant in Ireland, it means a very significant investment. They will want to know they will be able to sell the output. A huge part of what we need is to push the pipeline of work. At the moment, a very significant proportion of that pipeline is coming from the private sector. I read the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council's document last weekend. The funny thing is that when I got to the end of it, I did not feel all that great. I wondered why I was not feeling good after reading this advisory document. I looked at it again and considered the words it used. The word "overheating" was used 39 times. The word "shock" was in it 78 times, "debt" was in it 173 times and "adverse" was used 23 times.

It was a report that made people worried that everybody was saying something was going wrong. Some parts of our industry, such as the civil engineering sector and the regions, have not really had the same crack of the whip as other parts of it. We know that connectivity is a huge part of the social fabric of our regions. Some parts of the country are not connected properly to other parts of it. Dublin needs to go underground. It has to go underground. There is no more room on the streets. If we want to have a fabulous capital city, we have to move forward with these projects. The MetroLink project has been going slowly for a number of months. We need these things to move forward quickly because we do not see big projects starting on the ground until 2020. That will be the first of them if it starts then. People are not being given the confidence to invest and use their skills to make a product that people will buy. Pushing out the pipeline of work is probably one of the biggest things we need. I ask the committee to support our campaign to bring people into the construction industry.