Daniel McConnell

Welcome back to the Business Post podcast, Peter.

That was good fun, wasn't it?

I thought like the area that I thought he might struggle a bit to answer was the kind of the 40,000, the failure in housing issue.

And, you know, he kind of said, listen, if I got a projection wrong, I wasn't the only one to get a projection wrong, blah, blah, blah.

But I have to if I have to own it, I will.

Like you kind of go, well, listen, you know, I've already apologized.

I can't apologize enough again, you know.

Yeah.

I was kind of at the heart of my question of whether he is or not in control of his own department because, again, you know, to the outside you say, well, hang on, you're one of 15 ministers at the cabinet table and

You're running the country in various guises.

You're making big decisions, signing off on major investment programs, all that kind of stuff.

But yet at the end of the day, you're at the behest of civil servants.

You're at the behest of people who are not elected, not accountable to anybody.

You can operate in the shadows, et cetera, like that.

I also thought from my perspective, when he was getting into discussions around

you know, the use of, you know, obviously there are changes to the planning laws and we've talked about the accelerating infrastructure report with Seán O'Driscoll, et cetera, et cetera, but, you know, the use of judicial reviews and kind of, like, I called it, he said, like, should, like, are groups like Antashca,

A bit more, maybe.

Bit more of this, bit more of that.

He's definitely less of an ideologue than Eamon Ryan is.

And he's far more a pragmatic politician, I would think.