Ian Talbot

that labour costs were now a significant issue.

That's nearly two-thirds of businesses.

No, there are five big trends that come through, and regulatory burden is the third of those five.

There are other parts of Europe where it's slightly higher.

But no, we're probably around average in Europe on this.

And of course, a lot of issues that we have, we tend to think of things in our own framework and it's unique for us.

What we're seeing through the survey of 41,000 businesses across 35 European countries is that a lot of the challenges our businesses face are very similar.

But the regulatory burden, I think the big concern people have is it's not reducing.

Europe has been talking about reducing the regulatory burden.

Ursula von der Leyen in her State of the Union speech two years ago talked about 25 to 30 percent reduction in burden.

And nobody's seeing that coming through.

Some of that comes from Europe, but some of that has to come locally as well.

Yeah, migration's an interesting topic.

It's always a balance.

And at the moment, we do have skills shortages.

We also have a growing economy.

We know we need things like huge surge in investment in our infrastructure and we need people to undertake that work.

I think what's really important is we're bringing in people with the right skills or that we very quickly retrain people in skills that are critical to incorporate them into the Irish economy.

So one of the things we've been talking about for the last couple of years actually is the importance of language skills for people like Ukrainian migrants coming in.

for example, just to get them up to speed in English language very quickly so they can contribute the skills they undoubtedly have into our economy quicker.