Mr. Pat Lucey:

That is going on day in, day out in our industry but the fact is that we are running out of work. Our members in the Dublin area are not out of work. However, if we go around to the regions all we hear is that there is nothing happening. People are hopping into their cars and driving to Dublin. They make long journeys into Dublin. Now, they do not want to come to Dublin any longer. They say they do not want to put up with the traffic. They want to get work close to home. There are many threads to this.

The Chairman mentioned innovation and the ability to be productive. Our top 50 companies have 30% of turnover outside of Ireland. That happens because the big private employers that use our companies rate them to be among the best in the world. They take them to other countries to do jobs for them rather than using the local industry. That is an incredible compliment to the people who work in the industry.

We must have a pipeline of work ahead of us at home that allows people to invest. Right now, they are afraid. Construction is not a fun business to be in at present. It tends to get a good deal of negative press. At the same time, however, when we put our people on site and we want to solve a problem, it is clear the sector is full of problem-solvers. The difficulty is that the lead-in period to work commencing is so long. I wish Deputy Lisa Chambers the best and I encourage her to push hard. It will happen, but it is not going to happen quickly because that is the nature of the system. We need to learn that in order to make things happen, we have to press the button early. Each time we get to the end of a cycle, telephone calls come into the CIF from different politicians asking where the shovel-ready projects are. There is no such thing as a shovel-ready project without four or five years of lead-in work to make it so. The people who make these decisions are those holding the purse strings. They allow the engineering, surveys and consultations and so on to take place on projects in order to enable them to become shovel-ready.