Ms Áine Myler:

Regarding the skills issue, Deputy Casey talked about apprenticeships, and we have talked about this with the construction sector group before. Looking to the future, we consider that quite a lot of what we build, if it has a standard format, will be built on a modular basis. The skills we will need in five or ten years' time are therefore not the skills we have today. A body such as the LDA could drive the implementation of some of this future-based production method of building, whether of houses or other buildings, such as schools. Necessarily, then, the agency will almost influence and inform the skills the people working in the sector will need. I see this as an opportunity for a manufacturing base in this country. This is a submission we made even in this year's budget. We have always been good at making things around the construction components, but I refer to the agency's knowledge of the demand that is out there, for instance, in social and affordable housing to commission a lot of these. As CIF rightly says, we are in competition for supply of many components, be they modular or traditional elements of building. If we could produce some of those here ourselves, that would be fantastic. Bodies such as the LDA potentially flatten out the up-and-down cycles we have had across our delivery cycle for our entire existence, frankly. If, as I said, they can modulate that critical economic cycle we have in construction, it will give people more confidence to come to work in the market and the sector. It will also give them a future-facing skills base with which to do that. That is what we are all about in Ireland: upskilling and adding value. Regarding the LDA, that sounds a bit tangential at this point.

I will make one further point about governance. I can totally see why it would appear to be undemocratic to have an all-encompassing agency with very few employees reporting to one line manager about the entirety of the country's assets, and I absolutely hear Deputy Casey's concerns in that regard. Nailing this down in the legislation will be like nailing jelly to a wall, but it will have to be done. The competition that might be perceived in the private sector would be a concern in that the LDA would be almost too powerful in a way and that competition with the private sector could be somewhat off-putting. That is an important balance that the legislation will have to get right. It should not undermine the efforts many good local authorities already make to go out and buy in pieces of land and pieces of property that they see there might be a strategic value to in five or ten years' time. They might not even bother doing that because they might believe that somebody else will do it for them or that there is no need because somebody might decide for them that that is not the best use of their time and that they want them to do something else. That very strategic balance between local and national powers will have to be struck.