OPINION: Businesses need bolder decision making by Government

Last week, Chambers Ireland held our first in-person budget event since before Covid-19 with over 20 Chambers of Commerce from throughout the country and more than 60 TDs, senators, and ministers in attendance. As the national body that supports our chambers across all the constituencies, our budget priorities are national, but this event gives our members the chance to bring their local concerns to politicians from across the parties and the country.
Nationally, we want next year’s budget to ensure that the right investments are delivered. We need to improve productivity and reduce the costs of doing business. To accomplish this, Chambers Ireland has called on the Government to deliver the infrastructure needed to address the lost decade of investment, and to ensure that much more housing is built.
Ireland’s economic performance in the last ten years has been quite extraordinary, with the most recent validation being the country’s claiming of second place in the 2023 IMD World Competitive Rankings. Bouncing back from the crises that engulfed us from 2008, the thriving economy and our attractiveness to foreign direct investment – arising from policy choices in the past that have proven highly effective – have created an enviable budgetary surplus and effectively full employment.
But this is no time for complacency. These positive aspects create their own challenges, such as ensuring that Government current expenditure is based on a realistic assessment of the percentage of tax revenues likely to be sustainable and addressing skills shortages.
Our pre-budget submissions for the last number of years have focused on housing as a significant concern for our members. While measurable progress is now being made, with substantial commitment of State funds and new builds now being delivered in substantial numbers, it will come as no surprise that the housing crisis remains a paramount concern within our network.
In addition to continuing and increasing the levels of investment committed to deliver Housing for All, promised measures such as the enactment of the new Planning Bill must be delivered.
We have an enormous capacity-constraint issue across our country; businesses would be doing more but for the lack of skilled workers. With the unemployment rate at less than 4 percent our members are constrained in their capacity to grow their businesses from our existing labour force, and employers who seek to bring in workers from abroad face enormous challenges in getting new employees to come to settle here.
In addition, as we saw from the Census 2022 figures, there are more people now living in Ireland than had been projected in 2017 when we were developing our National Planning Framework, which means that our future strategic plans are being overtaken by circumstances.
We know that there is no simple response to this complicated problem and that the solutions to our housing crisis and infrastructure deficit will continue to require many strands of muscular action across numerous departments and agencies. Incrementalism often has great value in the adaptation of government policy, but the speed at which the housing situation worsened as our economy recovered suggests that the policy response is being outpaced by circumstances and must keep evolving.
Given that there is a capacity issue within both the construction sector, and more importantly, within the agencies of State that facilitate construction, we know that this is not a problem that can be solved through funding alone. We need bolder decision making across Government.
And strategically, our growing population also makes our long-term ambitions around the National Development Fund even more important.
We commend the Government in its decision to seed the excess Corporation Tax receipts in a Reserve fund and urge taking a step further to ensure that these funds are ring-fenced for key infrastructure projects that can secure continued investment in critical infrastructure delivery, including housing into the future.
Our members need our towns and cities to be attractive places to live and work, decarbonised transport options, and secure energy supplies. Behind the headlines of the Competitiveness report, Ireland ranked 19th for infrastructure; we must aim for better.
With the green transition before us, Ireland has an enormous opportunity, but we are at risk of letting opportunity slip from our grasp unless state bodies begin delivering change more rapidly.

•   Ian Talbot is Chief Executive of Chambers Ireland. For more on the organisation and its work, see www.chambers.ie.