Policy with purpose

Shane Conneely, Director of Policy and Communications at Chambers Ireland, outlines the organisation’s top policy priorities for 2023 in response to the main challenges facing its member businesses.

Chambers Ireland uses the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to shape our policy outputs. Each is important but certain ones such as Decent Work and Economic Growth, Gender Equality and Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure have an evident overlap with our members’ interests.

As an organisation that is celebrating our 100th anniversary, we take the long view and also strongly advocate for the Sustainable Cities and Communities and Climate Action SDG goals throughout our work.

Creating any kind of analysis of the Irish economy has its challenges at the moment. We have been responding to many major uncertainties in recent years: Brexit, Covid-19 and energy, supply-chain, in ation and housing crises have all been shaping the business environment.

However, this is not an unusual experience for Irish businesses. Over the past 20 years we have known the Celtic Tiger boom, the Great Financial Crisis and a few short years of economic stability between 2012 and 2016 before the British voted to leave the EU and this cycle of crises commenced.

e Irish businesses which have traded throughout this have known serious struggles, and have survived, which breeds its own con dence. Newer businesses were created despite the disruption and di culties and so have an inherent optimism.

Looking towards the future our members are optimistic about their businesses and the opportunities that are before them in 2023, but most also say they have a wider concern about the rest of the economy. When speaking to members throughout the country, they tell us that they’re doing well but are having trouble nding and retaining sta . e challenges that our members are facing are ones of constraint. ey o en have to leave business on the table because they do not have the internal capacity to take on all the opportunities that are there.

Facing constraints

Housing continues to be one of the key problems that businesses are facing, because housing issues lead to the sta ng issues which constrain commercial activity.

e di culty in nding and maintaining a home is directly leading to the tightness in the labour market. Employers are routinely telling us that housing uncertainty is resulting in a cycle of taking on junior sta that need upskilling before they can be wholly productive within the rm.

However, just as they settle into the rm, leases come up for renewal, people want to move out of the family home, landlords sell up or someone just wants to purchase their own home. ese events bring in claims for higher pay to meet higher housing costs.

e time house-hunting takes results in lower productivity and this o en continues as a result of longer commutes to more distant homes. Alternatively, the search for a new home leads to the employee moving to the far side of the country or abroad, taking their expertise with them.

is cycle is particularly pronounced in regional areas where people who would have previously lived and worked locally are able to take on new jobs, further a eld, because they can work remotely. is is bringing city wages to regional areas – in the longer term this will be great for those areas, but right now it’s leading to regional skills shortages. Consequently those rms are taking on employees with less experience to ll gaps, reducing productivity further.

Top two priorities

With these concerns in mind, our top two policy priorities for 2023 are Housing & Urbanisation and Skills & Talent.

Regarding Housing & Urbanisation, we are pushing government to take greater action on the underutilised and vacant properties which are an enormous underexploited resource for the economy; this is also key to our support of the Sustainable Cities and Communities goal.

On Skills &Talent, we are looking for greater exibility to help people who are in Ireland, but are excluded from the workforce as a result of caring duties or disability, to be able to work as much as these limitations allow them to. is complements both the Gender Equality and Decent work and Economic Growth SDG goals.

“Housing continues to be one of the key problems that businesses are facing, because housing issues lead to the sta ing issues which constrain commercial activity.”

We have a very high incidence of labour force non-participation for women in Ireland. Given that female workers are typically better educated than their male peers, this wastes a huge amount of talent. We are also looking for greater exibility with work permits and visas; o cials need to understand that because of quality-of-life issues, especially housing, Ireland is no longer an attractive place to migrate to. We should therefore be ensuring that those who want to come here don’t experience unnecessary hurdles in doing so.

The longer term

Over the longer term we continue to advocate for more ambition regarding renewable energy. Ireland has immense untapped energy resources, and also some of the most expensive electricity in Europe. Upgrading our Grid to allow us to land the renewable energy we need to be able to meet our Climate Action targets will not only help the environment but will also bring down the cost of electricity on the island.

We are looking at Productivity & Competitiveness in an overarching way. Tight labour markets and the constraints on businesses suggest that there is a risk that in ation will continue with us for longer than our peer nations. is will undermine our national competitiveness. Given that supplyside constraints are the drivers, these issues will need supply-side actions.

Speci cally, we need to greatly increase the number of homes which are available to house our existing workforce. We also need housing for the large amount of migrant labour which will be needed to deliver both the National Development Plan and Housing for All programme.