Ms Patricia King:

This is where the pandemic and the Brexit chilling effect can overlap. First, there will be some turnover in the economy in areas like retail, and in some parts of accommodation and food. All one has to do is look across at the UK to see what is happening to the retail sector and some of that is going to happen in Ireland. Let us take a regional town where employment depends on a good manufacturing industry located on the outskirts, has solid retail outlets in the town and has some accommodation and food outlets in the town. Those are some of the basic components of the economic activity in a small or medium-sized regional town. If one presumes Brexit may cause turbulence in the manufacturing outlet located on the outskirts of the town, and the pandemic has affected retail and accommodation, then one is talking about a very bleak outlook for at least a number of years. Therefore, one of the key pieces is to build on retraining and reskilling in order to have people prepared to enter the labour market albeit doing different jobs. Unfortunately, Ireland is very low in terms of how we respond on that.