Aidan,
If i was in your shoes I would be planning to move abroad - I am currently working in NI and although there are some (very small) green shoots of projects starting - i am not very optimistic for the overall construction industry in North or South.

If your eligible to travel to US, Oz or Canada you have brilliant options that are not available to many others.

I'm sure you'd like to return to Ireland sometime because its a great place to live with great people but use these times to your advantage and get some great experience worldwide!!

Both research and over a decade (1983 to 1995) in practice as an adult career guidance adviser dramatised for me two risks of error to which you are exposed. One is how people mistakenly define their work capability in what they formally study; and the other is how they so often have a major blind spot about strengths and limitations of their own personalities (far more than about personalities of other people they have worked with).

Identifying appropriate work opportunities depends on how you define potential job markets as well as your own combination of skills, knowledge, attitudes and mobility. Just because you are familiar with English (and Irish?) right now doesn't mean you can't develop a good working knowledge of another language within the same time it would taken you to settle down the other side of the world.

To the extent that you may have an extrovert, agreeable, conscientious personality and willingness to learn from experience, you may well be able to translate your foreman experience + knowledge of safety and health into a variety of supervisory/team leader or negoatiing roles.

While the USA and Canada may suit your capabilities, there may also be opportunities for someone with what you can offer in other European countries like the Netherlands.

You haven't indicated whether there is any reason why you don't make the next phase in your career the one in which you improve your career prospects by adding indepth understanding of what makes people tick at work, by doing a research-based degree in psychology or ergonomics applied to safety,. One of the world's leading experts on behavioural safety left his work on building sites as a scaffolder and spent several years in transition before setting up Behaivoural Management Systems and beyond that becoming a professor of safety psychology.

You have most of your career ahead of you......