Daniel McConnell

Now, we haven't had a huge number of politicians on this podcast.

I think we've had the Taoiseach, which Daniel Murray, our colleague, our policy editor, managed to track down in Cambridge.

But today's guest is someone who I've been very keen to interview for a while, given his role both as energy minister and as transport minister, because he's at that cross-section of...

an area that is of huge focus for us, which is infrastructure and the growth of the country and the next steps, etc.

So Dara O'Brien, who is the, as I call him, the pugnacious bruiser from Malahide.

I think he liked that.

He did, yeah.

But, you know, someone who has, I think, had to weather a fair bit of criticism given his perceived failure in housing over the failure to deliver 40,000 houses in the year of an election.

but someone who has gone into transport and I had a couple of controversies he's had to deal with be Dublin Airport and the Kenny Jacobs affair which we wrote up quite a bit about but I thought for me it was interesting to kind of hear him describe life as a minister

being in control or not of a department, the system, fighting the system at some point.

Again, Peter, you listened to it, so what did you think?

But then also pressing him about, you know, how to actually move things forward.

Like, I mean, like, and he kind of reveals that, like, the permanent government or the civil service are not averse to kind of playing games or, you know, using tricks or devices to slow things down, even when a government decision has been taken.

Because of a lack of paper clips here, we haven't been able to move forward.

He clearly has leadership ambitions.

He's not going to push me all Martin under a bus.

Yeah.

And he talked a lot about having a good working relationship and blah, blah, blah and the usual kind of stuff.

But, you know, kind of the last question, you know, there's lots of people in your party who would want a dub leader.

Well, I'm a dub too.