WHAT A master-stroke it was by the Construction Industry Council (CIC) to send out Tom Costello instead of Tom Parlon to explain that creative plan to re-charge construction. In essence, the plan would open the floodgates on various caches of cash, running to billions and currently dormant or invested abroad.

The MD of Sisk Son played a blinder in a flurry of interviews, being consistently calm and instructive in the face of sceptical interviewers. Understandably ‘de meedja’ have grown used to dismantling political rhetoric, especially in the wake of official botched financial projections.

Costello took his interviewers step-by-step through the process, with the insights of a manager who has overseen one of the most enduring of our major building firms. He demonstrated how funding now of €5 billion to €6 billion would save about half that amount in social welfare and dole payments and put 70,000 construction workers back onto much-needed building/remedial work in schools, hospitals, roads.

The CIC is made-up of industry professionals, including engineers, surveyors, architects and the CIF (Construction Industry Federation), who usually have Tom Parlon out to bat for them. But Parlon, an extremely capable and articulate spokesman for CIF, is currently tainted with having been a senior politician, thereby suffering a “credibility deficit” in the current lack of trust in the political establishment. Hence the wisdom of putting Costello in the hot seat, where he seems to have caught the ear of government and governed.