Dr. Kieran McQuinn:

From an overall perspective, if we were to go below 4% unemployment, which I would not be surprised to see happen next year, it would be almost unprecedented as far as the Irish labour market is concerned. Even with data going back to the mid-1960s, I do not think we have ever really seen unemployment below 4%. It will present sizeable challenges in terms of the resourcing of key sectors of the economy. We are carrying out a study on the implications of this in the construction sector and are coming up with some policies that might be useful in terms of targeting that issue. We hope to have that work published relatively soon. In the past, we relied a lot on inward migration as a mechanism to alleviate those kind of constraints in the domestic sector.

Clearly, whatever policies we can implement to facilitate that going forward will be very important if we are going to avoid some of the shortages in particular sectors.