All of this has changed, and while many people focus on the developers and the muddy boot brigade that actually build the constructions, there is a large population of professionals working in the construction industry who are managing to find ample employment across the projects of Ireland.

"There are definitely skills gaps in the construction industry, " said Thomas Doyle, operations and recruitment director at TechStaff, a company which supplies the professional labour needs of the construction industry, from design to completion, and occasionally beyond. "These exist across the board in design, in architecture, and in civil and structural engineering. There is also a huge shortage of quantity surveyors, and good project managers can be scarce."

These shortages of skills are creating their own microcosm of the labour market for the construction industry. But while many quality professionals are actively headhunted for newer developments, the reality is that, because much construction work is project-based, top professionals do tend to become free from time to time - unlike many professionals in the wider business community.

"Anyone who is good will be working at the moment, " said Doyle. "This is especially true of Irish design professionals, although recent times have also seen a turnaround in attitudes towards foreign workers. And while there has been a presence of foreign workers at the labour end of the market for a number of years, this is now extending into the professional roles. In the past, a foreign professional would have been seen as something of a last resort, but now it is commonplace to have architects that are Polish or Brazilian, and a lead architect with a top firm of consultant engineers is actually Jordanian."

Another arena where there is a significant skills shortage at the moment is the whole environmental area of construction.

"Anyone who has expertise in sustainable energy will find themselves in a job, " said Doyle. "Their experience may not necessarily allow them to command a premium in terms of their remuneration packages, but they will probably find themselves being put onto more interesting jobs."

Many of these "interesting" jobs will be either in large scale commercial/industrial builds, or in civil projects.

The impeding downturn in the scale of new housing development would ordinarily impact negatively on recruitment in a construction sector. But the advent of the new NDP and some very large scale civil projects (think Metro, think Dublin Airport), coupled with major commercial construction (think Dublin Docklands, think Bray) should make the construction industry a happy hunting ground for professionals, especially design professionals, for some years to come.