Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Regardless of whether the State or the private sector was seeking to hire them, they were not available in the quantity we needed in recent years. That is the key point I am making to the Deputy. If they were not there to be hired, changing the nature of the employer would not have made any difference.

What we are doing to build up capacity involves the steps that were taken by the then Minister and now Taoiseach, Deputy Harris, and are now being continued by the Minister, Deputy O’Donovan, in respect of apprenticeships and encouraging more people into the construction sector, showing them that it is something they can have a career in, and giving them the training and support they need to be provided with good jobs over longer working lives. These are the steps that are being taken from a human capital point of view.

Other steps that the Government has taken to try to build up general capacity in the economy include the changes we made to the public spending code, whereby we moved from a code that could at times be rigid to infrastructural guidelines, thereby allowing individual Departments more responsibility so that the money we allocate to them can more quickly turn into the delivery of projects. We have made changes to the capital works management framework in order to rebalance risk within the public works contract and further incentivise SMEs to become involved in the delivery of important public sector projects. We have made changes to how we oversee the implementation of the national development plan, whereby Ministers must bring forward updates on their capital spending and bring forward an overall statement to the Cabinet every quarter to update it on what we are doing to deliver the NDP on top of the large increases in capital expenditure that I outlined to Deputy Conway-Walsh.

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