The recent revision to Ireland’s National Development Plan (NDP) put a welcome emphasis on infrastructure and underlined the financial resources that would be needed to deliver significant improvements. However, the plan was weak on detail and the projects that it would fund are only to be announced around the time of the budget. Meanwhile, it had little fresh to say on where the workforce to deliver the new programme would be found, beyond pointing out the scale of this issue. Without this missing piece, the whole programme could quickly run into the sand.
A few scant pages are included in the revised NDP on this key question. This is disappointing as this is a keynote document on one of the most vital issues facing the State – the housing and infrastructural shortage – and has been in preparation for a significant period. Economic consultants Indecon have been hired “to develop an integrated national framework for addressing priority construction workforce needs.” This is long overdue – though it is strange that consultants always seem need to undertake this kind of project.
The document refers to previous official estimates that around 80,000 additional construction workers would be needed to build the 300,000 houses targeted by the Government during its term and to retrofit the existing housing stock. As the construction sector currently employs some 177,000 people, this is a very significant 45 per cent increase.
Work by the Fiscal Advisory Council, the budget watchdog, comes up with a similar figure of 80,000 extra constructions workers being required to upgrade Ireland’s lagging infrastructure.
RM Block
There are no easy answers in terms of where the additional workforce can be found. The sector has hired many migrant employees in recent years and more are likely to come. In the short term, however, the question is where are these people to live, in an economy where there is a shortage of housing and rents are sky high?
There will be trade-offs. Can Ireland manage to build new houses while also retrofitting the existing stock ? Can employees be diverted from other sectors? Expanded training and apprenticeship programmes are another obvious route.
There has long been talk, meanwhile, of improving the productivity of the building sector, estimated by the council to be 30 per cent below the European average. But the value of “modern methods of construction” have featured in many official reports over the years and it seems Ireland still lags well behind.
This complex issue of finding the workforce is the kind of detail which has been missing from national planning in recent years. Lip service is paid, but little is done to forensically address the issues vital to actually getting things done.
