The GRASP programme has launched a new Masterclass series in Manorhamilton, giving contractors, educators and policymakers a shared platform to prepare the region's construction workforce for green skills demand years ahead of a widely forecast shortage.

GRASP, the €9.8m (£8.3m) Green Accelerator Skills Programme, is a cross-border initiative led by South West College and delivered by nine partner organisations across Northern Ireland and the Irish border counties, supported by PEACEPLUS and co-funded by the EU, UK and Irish governments and the Northern Ireland Executive.

The Masterclass itself, hosted by training provider Future Cast, brought industry, education and government representatives together for demonstrations of Building Information Modelling, digital twins, drones and robotics, with contributions from Sisk, Harcourt Technologies, KORE Retrofit and CITB NI.

GRASP aims to deliver accredited training to more than 2,000 construction operatives, technicians and managers by 2028, covering retrofit, heat pumps, photovoltaics, Passivhaus standards and digital construction; more than 300 participants were already enrolled, with over 1,000 students engaged across 28 schools.

This training push targets the gap between construction demand and today's workforce, rather than building capacity for its own sake.

Ireland needs to recruit up to 120,000 additional skilled construction workers and reskill a further 164,000 by 2030 to meet its housing and climate targets, according to research led by the Technological University of the Shannon, with apprenticeship enrolment still skewed heavily toward electricians and away from trades such as plumbing and carpentry.

That shortage is already showing up in delivery: the Construction Industry Federation's own data identifies labour availability, not client demand, as the binding constraint shaping how much work contractors can take on and how programmes are sequenced heading into 2026, with civil engineering and specialist contracting, the disciplines GRASP targets most directly, recording the strongest turnover growth and the tightest capacity at the same time.

For the sector, cross-border, EU-co-funded skills programmes like GRASP are becoming one of the main delivery mechanisms for closing that gap in specific trades, retrofit, heat pumps and digital construction among them, where private training capacity alone has not kept pace with policy targets.

Source: Belfast News Letter / Irish Green Building Council / Nectoselection