Industrial Development Dail Éireann — 2025-02-12 ============================================================ Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire Classical economists Karl Marx and David Ricardo, on different sides of the political spectrum, agreed that all wealth is derived from labour. One of our biggest problems is skills shortages in every sector of our economy, whether it is construction, the health service, education or retail. The reason is increasing numbers in their tens of thousands of young people are bailing out of the country because they cannot afford to live here. If we are talking about competitiveness, this is the biggest challenge. I do not like competition as the basis of an economy but let us say we need the economy to function in order----- --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-02-12/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:00:55+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-02-12