Ian Talbot

Well, as you rightly point out, the three big issues they have that are coming through are labour costs, lack of skilled workers and regulatory burden.

I suppose we were a bit surprised that things like tariffs didn't come through as strongly.

They came through more strongly in other European countries.

But the key challenge is that for the last few years, things like the growth in regulation, the higher cost of living, driving higher wage demands and so on, are really just keeping businesses ticking over.

And also, of course, there's the uncertainty created by, for example, Trump and his tariffs and the response to that as well.

So things like the Chinese reaction by restricting rare earths

materials, which is having an impact in certain areas of manufacturing as well.

So all these things are leading to a bit of a lack of investment and concern.

And companies have just, I mean, what's clear in this sentiment survey, we've been roughly asking the same six questions for about 10 years now.

And what we're seeing is that since before COVID, there was a slight lift as we came out of COVID.

But otherwise, confidence levels have been low since about 2019.

We really need to turn that around and we have things like the Draghi and Letter reports on competitiveness and productivity.

And we really need to start implementing those, not just in Europe, but also in Ireland.

The labour costs, the lack of skilled workers and the regulatory burden.

This is across the board at this stage because we're seeing some of the higher-end manufacturing businesses, they are concerned about tariffs.

So that's increasing their costs as it is.

So they really don't need high labour demand coming through as well.

And, of course, the lack of skilled workers is pushing up the price of the workers with those skills in their particular areas.

So this is becoming increasingly common.

I mean, 63% of our businesses...