Business leaders and former Taoisigh yesterday warned that housing and labour shortages could inflict damage on the Republic's economy. Delegates at the Small Firms' Association annual conference in Dublin heard calls for the construction of new cities to ease the burden of the capital.
Both the current and a former leader of Fine Gael - Mr John Bruton and Dr Garret FitzGerald - pointed to serious deficiencies in infrastructure. Mr Mark FitzGerald, chairman and chief executive of the Sherry FitzGerald group, called for the creation of new towns and cities, and the chairman of the Small Firms' Association, Mr Kieran Crowley, said programmes should be devised to train another 50,000 unemployed people for work.
Mr Bruton said politics had a duty to address the issue of providing housing and associated infrastructure for the rapidly increasing number of households that needed it.
"For every 10 houses we have today, we must provide an additional four within the next 10 years," he told the gathering. "This is the biggest construction project undertaken in Ireland in the past 1,000 years, and it must be tackled as a single project, not as a multitude of unco-ordinated and contradictory initiatives."
He criticised "the BANANA factor - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything", warning that unless politicians could overcome local objections to every project, it could choke the economy.
Dr FitzGerald said that democratic consultation had been turned into a nightmare of obstruction, often by narrowly-based interest groups.
"The time-scale of implementation of key decisions, such as the introduction of bus lanes, or the building of a light rail system, is ludicrously long," he said. "And this slowness greatly aggravates the problems that arise from the extraordinary speed at which we have in the past dozen years moved from being a poor country by European standards to being as well off as most of our neighbours."
Dr Fitzgerald's son, Mr Mark FitzGerald, said the country was "at a crossroads", where one path could lead to prolonged economic prosperity shared by all, and another towards a two-tier, unequal society. To deal with the housing crisis, the Government should establish a single agency with wide, executive powers to help deliver up to half a million new homes. Some of these should be built in up to 12 new cities, he added, linked by rapid rail systems to Dublin.
Mr Crowley said the economic challenge today was best how to manage growth. He said that a jobless rate of 4 per cent - compared with the current 6 per cent - would probably represent "full employment".
"That means that there are some 40,000 to 50,000 people still unemployed for whom, given the right training and incentives, here is an opportunity to re-integrate into the workforce," he said.
Market-oriented skills courses, as well as tax breaks for childcare, could help ease the shortage of labour, he said.
