Engineers Ireland President Dave Murphy has called for an urgent, coordinated national response to Ireland's growing engineering skills shortage, warning that the country's ambitions for housing, infrastructure, energy, and industrial development cannot be realised without the skilled professionals needed to deliver them.

Delivering his Presidential Address this evening, Who Will Engineer Ireland’s Future? Why Ireland’s Engineering Shortage Matters – and What We Can Do About It, Mr Murphy will warn that Ireland may require up to 30,000 additional engineers by 2031 to meet growing demand across housing, energy, water, transport, manufacturing, and technology.

Among his proposals to address this issue are an Irish Engineering Talent Forum and a major national campaign to encourage more young people to pursue engineering careers.

An Engineering Talent Forum would bring together a wide range of Governmental and industry stakeholders to track Ireland’s engineering pipeline from secondary school through education, graduation, employment, and retirement, allowing for Ireland’s critical skills shortage in engineering to be better addressed.

The Engineering Talent Forum would lead the development of a national Engineering Capacity Plan and coordinate a multi-year Engineering Recruitment Campaign, designed to demonstrate that engineering is for anyone who wants to change things for the better.

Building on Engineers Ireland’s STEPS programme, which has reached more than two million children, teachers, and parents over 25 years, the national campaign would target primary and secondary school students, parents, teachers, guidance counsellors, and mature learners, demonstrating the breadth and transformative impact of a career in engineering.

The campaign would place particular emphasis on encouraging girls and young women to enter the profession, with women currently representing only 12% to 15% of Ireland’s engineering workforce.

Speaking ahead of the event, Mr Murphy said,

“Young people do not fall in love with professions. They fall in love with possibilities. And engineering offers extraordinary possibilities.

We must clearly show them the positive impact that engineers have in every corner of this country: designing renewable energy systems, delivering housing and water infrastructure, developing medical devices, and creating new technologies.

Almost every major ambition Ireland has eventually becomes an engineering project, but we are not producing enough engineers to realise these ambitions. And without a sufficient supply of engineers, we will have less capacity to build homes, modernise our infrastructure, complete our energy transition, or remain internationally competitive.

The shortage of engineers, however, is not inevitable, but action and leadership are required now to build the engineering talent Ireland needs.”