Professor Michael McMahon:

I will say something and then Dr. Bergin and Mr. Conroy will add something so the Deputy will get the full hat trick. There are two things I will say. On the apprenticeships, even where there are limits, that does not mean they are not necessarily a policy worth pursuing. It is just worth bearing in mind that they do not bear fruit super quickly. It is not a machine where you push a button and there is a whole bunch of ready-to-go builders, plumbers and electricians. We talked about having a steady and high capacity in the construction sector and not one that dips and then people disappear and do not come back. That is important.

On immigration, there is one fact I tell many people about Ireland that they generally do not know. We are one of the few countries in the world - I believe there are only two of us - that have a lower population now than in 1820. If we had the same population growth that most other countries had this would be a country of some 25 million or 27 million. This is calculated on it being an all-island economy back then. That is a phenomenal difference from where we actually are. On the value of immigration, I do not know if I have seen the exact figures - I am hoping someone beside me will tell me this - but given a sort of eyeball or ocular assessment of what has been going on, I suspect that a lot of the immigration we see tends to be younger working-age people. I do not know if people come here just to retire. I suspect that the weather suggests they do not but I may be wrong, at least in aggregate. At least the evidence from many other countries of attracting prime working-age people is that they tend to use health services less. They do use education services as they tend to have families, but they also add a lot on taxation, as the Deputy has said. I do not have an exact number but we are also a country that has a long history of sending people to other countries. We argue ourselves, and if we go to the EPIC museum, it is there, that we added a lot to many countries financially and in other ways. I agree with the Deputy that there is definitely a strong case to be made for immigration as a generally welcome policy subject to the challenge we talked about at the very start, which is you have to address infrastructure deficits.