According to data for the monthly FAS/ESRI employment and vacancies survey, the number of Irish construction companies planning on letting staff go is at the highest point since May 2002, but companies are still struggling to fill site management and professional positions.
The FAS ESRI survey indicated that just over 50 percent of all construction bosses expect that they will employ the same number of people in the coming months, while less than a third will consider hiring more.
The survey also revealed that positions left unfilled in the construction sector rose for the second consecutive month to 10 percent. The positions proving most difficult to fill include quantity surveyors, construction managers and engineers.
However in recent comments from Hank Fogarty, President of the Irish Construction Industry Federation, he remains upbeat about opportunities in the sector. While he said up to 20,000 job losses are inevitable in the construction sector because of the slowdown in house building, he repeated his conviction that “they won't fall back by anything like what the commentators are saying. We would estimate 15-20,000 job losses.”
Fogarty told the Sunday Tribune newspaper that analysts did not fully understand the dynamics of the industry.
"A huge number of house building companies also have civil engineering and commercial building interests and they are not going to let good people go," he said. "Everybody is working to overcapacity at the moment and a lot of people will be slotted in elsewhere."
He predicted that the average number of hours worked by people in the industry would fall from "extraordinary hours" to less demanding "long hours". And, while housebuilding was shrinking, other sectors were still strong. In particular, ongoing maintenance was now worth €4.5bn a year, up from €2.2bn just three years ago.