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LAST UPDATE | 11 May
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.
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.
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 having delivered capital investment while missing the educational opportunity standing behind the site fence.
This is not an argument for turning children into construction workers, nor for making live building sites unsafe. It is an argument for recognising that a publicly funded school project is not just a capital asset. It is a live demonstration of design, engineering, sustainability, project management, digital construction, procurement, health and safety, energy systems and community development.
In other words, it is a classroom.
Ireland’s construction challenge is not simply a labour shortage. It is a systems’ shortage. We need workers, yes. But we also need workers who understand new materials, digital design, modular assembly, airtightness, heat pumps, lifecycle costing, carbon performance and the integration of building systems. We need people who can understand how a design decision made on a screen becomes a physical structure, and how that structure performs over decades.
That matters because the way we build is changing. Modern Methods of Construction, which involve modular units, off-site manufacturing, timber systems, digital twins and industrialised assembly, are no longer exotic add-ons. They are increasingly presented as part of the answer to cost, speed, productivity and sustainability.
Yet it’s been reported that there are some serious issues with some rapid-build and modular housing schemes, including defects, fire safety concerns and oversight failures. That should not make us abandon innovation. It should remind us that innovation without skills, governance and accountability is just risk with a nicer press release.
This is where procurement comes in. Every major publicly funded school building contract should include a mandatory education and social value clause. Not a vague line about “community engagement”. Not a glossy photograph of a contractor handing over a cheque to the local GAA club. A specific, measurable requirement that links public spending to public learning.
For example, for every €1 million of State expenditure on a school building project, the contractor could be required to provide a defined number of structured learning hours, site visits, digital demonstrations, guest sessions, micro-credential inputs or supervised placements in partnership with local Education and Training Boards, Technological Universities or apprenticeship providers.
That could mean senior-cycle students seeing how energy efficiency is designed into their new school wing. It could mean construction apprentices observing modular assembly in real time. It could mean engineering students analysing the building’s digital model. Not only that, but it could mean procurement students examining how sustainability requirements are translated into tender criteria. It could mean local teachers using the project to bring maths, geography, business, climate action and technology to life.
The point is not to slow down construction. The point is to make public construction work harder for the public.
There is precedent for this kind of thinking. Social value procurement is already used in other jurisdictions to connect public contracts with wider outcomes such as apprenticeships, community benefits, local employment, carbon reduction and skills development. Ireland talks regularly about joined-up government. This would be joined-up government with hard hats on.
The benefits would be practical.
For students, it would make education more tangible. For apprentices, it would improve access to real-world learning. For contractors, it would create a visible talent pipeline. For schools, it would transform disruption into opportunity. For the State, it would mean that the money spent on public infrastructure also strengthens the workforce needed to deliver the next round of public infrastructure.
This matters because the housing and infrastructure debate is becoming trapped in a loop. We announce targets, then we miss targets, and we blame planning, costs, labour shortages, materials, finance or regulation. The gap between ambition and delivery, including analysis of why Irish builders remain constrained in the middle of a housing crisis, and opinion pieces arguing that simply throwing more money at housing will not solve the shortage of workers.
But if labour and skills are among the binding constraints, then every publicly funded building site should be treated as part of the national skills infrastructure.
The school estate is the obvious place to start. Schools are geographically spread. They are socially embedded. They are publicly visible. They are directly connected to young people making decisions about future careers. They also offer a powerful symbolic shift. They can become the place where education happens and also the place where the future of work is made visible.
We often talk about the need to make apprenticeships more attractive. But we cannot do that by hiding skilled work behind hoardings and then wondering why young people do not see it. We cannot complain about the shortage of trades, technicians and construction professionals while treating live public projects as fenced-off inconveniences rather than structured learning opportunities.
Of course, there are issues to manage, including safety, insurance, scheduling, child protection, contractor capacity and curriculum alignment. But these are design challenges, not excuses. We already design complex procurement frameworks, school transport systems, exam timetables and construction programmes. We can design structured learning into public contracts if we decide it matters.
The deeper issue is cultural. Ireland still tends to treat procurement as administration rather than strategy. We buy the thing and then separately lament the conditions that make the thing difficult to deliver. That is no longer good enough.
If public money is building schools, it should also be building skills. If the State is paying for classrooms, it should also use the construction of those classrooms to teach. If we are serious about apprenticeships, modern construction, climate targets and infrastructure delivery, then the school building site should not just be a place where children are kept away from.
It should be part of the lesson.
The hoarding around a school site should not simply say “Keep Out”. It should say: “This is where Ireland learns how to build.”
Dr Paul Davis is a lecturer at Dublin City University’s Business School. He specialises in supply chain management and procurement.
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