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IRELAND HAS A habit of treating its biggest problems as separate files in separate departments. Housing sits over there. Education sits over here. Apprenticeships are somewhere else again.

Procurement, meanwhile, is treated as the paperwork that happens before anything useful begins.

But what if the paperwork is part of the problem?

Across the country, cranes are hovering over our cities, towns, suburbs and villages. Schools are being extended. New classrooms are being planned, and the State is spending billions through the National Development Plan, with The Journal reporting last year that the government was preparing what it described as Ireland’s biggest ever infrastructure plan.

Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

At the same time, we are repeatedly told that Ireland does not have enough construction workers, enough apprentices, enough technical capacity, or enough modern building skills to deliver the homes, schools and infrastructure we need.

That contradiction should bother us more than it does.

Spending money in the right place

In March, it was reported that the government had spent more than €400,000 over two years trying to attract Irish construction workers home from abroad, against a backdrop where Ireland may need tens of thousands of additional construction workers by 2030 to deliver housing and retrofitting targets. A separate report carried out last June noted that Ireland could need around 80,000 additional workers to meet housing and infrastructure targets.  

So here is the uncomfortable question: if we are already building publicly funded schools across the country, why are we not using those sites to train the next generation of construction workers, technicians, retrofit specialists, site managers and modern-methods-of-construction professionals?

At present, the answer is depressingly simple. We procure the building, but not the learning.

The Department of Education buys the school. The Department of Further and Higher Education worries about skills. Contractors price the job. Schools endure the disruption. Students walk past the hoarding. Apprentices look for placements elsewhere. And the State congratulates itself for........

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