The State will have to rely more on modern construction of prefabricated and modular homes because of a national shortage of construction workers, a Government Minister has said.

Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research and Innovation James Lawless said his department has estimated that Ireland has a “significant labour force gap” of 77,000 construction workers, which could only realistically be reduced to 53,000 workers.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Irish Times, the Fianna Fáil Minister said the country needed to consider how it can “do more with less because we may not have the workforce to do everything that we need to do”.

Ireland needs to build 300,000 new houses by 2030. The MetroLink project, the proposed rail link running north from Dublin city to Dublin Airport and beyond, reportedly needs 8,000 workers but Lawless says “closer to 10,000 workers” will be needed.

[ One-bed en suites for students ‘wasteful’, says Minister for Higher Education James LawlessOpens in new window ]

The Minister says Ireland will need to rely on “modern methods of construction” to build houses, student accommodation and commercial properties, relying more on prefabricated and modular properties built in factories and assembled on-site.

“We don’t have the workers to build out the housing, the infrastructure, the energy, the transport projects that we need,” he said.

Lawless said that if Ireland fully adopted modern construction, the shortfall in workers could fall to 40,000.

The Minister expects “a lot of the new student accommodation” to be built through modern methods of construction. Last year, he brought forward new design standards to “produce more rooms for the same floor space”.

The Government was trying to provide “high-quality, high-spec student accommodation blocks, but with more shared spaces”, he said.

He confirmed this was similar to plans for residential co-living involving communal space that former Fine Gael housing minister Eoghan Murphy proposed but later abandoned following a public backlash.

“I got where he was trying to go with that,” Lawless said.

“I’m not talking about forcing students on top of each other. There may be an option if students want to, if they’re friends or whatever, and they can apply for a double or a triple room. But it’s not going to be mandatory,” he said.

“But not every room necessarily needs an en suite, for example. So it’s about trying to get more occupancy and more shared facilities, which would be the norm in most student accommodation around the world.”

Lawless said Ireland was “overspeccing” student accommodation, adding features beyond requirements.

“If we have 10 individual rooms, and each gets an en suite, that seems quite wasteful to me. We could have probably 20 student beds in the same space, with maybe five shared bathrooms. That’s where we’re going with that.”

[ Student accommodation landlords should be allowed reset rents for new tenanciesOpens in new window ]

He said the new rental market changes coming into effect in March were required to incentivise investment in the Irish property market.

The new rent pressure zone (RPZ) reforms will allow landlords to reset rents to the market rate after a tenancy ends.

Lawless said he was concerned students “would be facing a rent reset every single year” because they were more likely to change tenancies in each academic year.

He believes the changes could leave students “exposed” and that they “could be unfairly taken advantage of” so he is considering linking rent increases to the property rather than the tenancy to allow one rent hike every three years “so that it’s not tied to the tenant changing”.

This would mean students would not experience “more than one rent reset in their undergraduate degree”, he said.

Among changes being considered are plans to change visa regulations for English language schools amid concerns that some are acting as “visa back doors” for immigration.

Following “various audits” of English language schools, of which there are more than 100, some schools were found to be “not actually really focused on providing education”.

He points out the mismatch between English language courses typically lasting about 12 weeks and an education visa lasting up to two years.

“It doesn’t necessarily add up,” he said.

Workers required for industries “probably shouldn’t be coming in the back door of the education system; it probably should be coming in the front door of the work visa system”.

He said there was “definitely” a shift in the Government position on immigration. He supports “value added” immigration, when people contribute to the workforce and fill a skills gap, and international protection, when people escape desperate circumstances and persecution.

“The difficulty is, when you have people that are neither of those things, and they’re sort of coming as an economic migrant, in a case where maybe they don’t particularly need it, or people are coming to take advantage of a system that was maybe a little bit overly generous at the outset,” he said.

Lawless says he has spoken to people who are concerned about international protection centres, who say they are happy for people to come to Ireland “with a shovel on your back, ready to work”.

“But if you’re coming here and you’re not really adding anything, you’re kind of coming and you’re taking,” he said.

“If there’s a genuine, solid need, absolutely, that the door is open.”

If people don’t have “a genuine need, you shouldn’t be coming in the first place”, he said.

“I think Ireland did fall victim to maybe being seen as a bit of a soft touch.”

Lawless singles out Roderic O’Gorman, the former Green Party minister responsible for international protection in the last (Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael-Greens) government, for criticism.

O’Gorman was “too ideological and not practical enough”, he said, and the “primary driver” then was “can we provide accommodation to all these people? – rather than, do we actually need to look at who’s coming in and why, and do they have a right to be here?”

Beyond immigration, Lawless’s department is responsible for research on the skills and investment needed for the Defence Forces. Lawless says he would be open to Ireland legislating to protect the zones around Ireland’s undersea cables better. He believes “no-fish zones or no-sail zones” over the cables might be considered “in due course”.

Lawless said it would be realistic for Ireland to aim to spend 0.5-1 per cent of GDP on defence “in the coming years” – up from 0.2 per cent currently, which compares with a 5 per cent target for Nato countries by 2035.

“At a minimum, we need to defend ourselves,” Lawless said says, adding that Ireland is becoming an “outlier” in Europe where other countries have become more defensive.

“I respect our position on neutrality, and that’s historical. I think there are reasons why we adopted neutrality, which may no longer apply. We did it to differentiate ourselves from the British Empire.”