Sinead O'Sullivan

speaker

721 appearances 4 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Sinead O'Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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The David McWilliams Podcast · Rich Country, Broken State · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

And in fact, not only did we not build it, but we squandered decades where we had this great tax income that we could have built something that was enduring and we didn't.

Because what we're really good at doing at the economic level is having people

this kind of pass-through economy where money and legal services and accounting services pass through, but nothing real actually materializes from that.

And if your job as the government is to make sure that that's what you're doing, you will start to do the same thing too.

By which I mean the government class become a conduit government.

That ideas pass through without being transformed into anything real.

that all we do is talk about spending and finance because the only thing that we care about is the accounting, whether it's taxes of the economy that's happening or the accounting of the systems that don't get built.

And there's no one whose job it is to say, hang on a second, forget about the money that we spent.

We have loads of money, right?

So park that conversation for 10 minutes and let's talk about the thing that never happened.

And so when our job as the government is to take care of an economy that isn't predicated on anything real, guess what you're going to have?

A bunch of people that do not create policies that create anything real.

I literally had this conversation with a stranger about two weeks ago.

And the more I hear about this, the sadder it makes me.

A hundred years ago, we had more trains in Ireland than we do today.

Yeah.

So how do you think we're doing delivery-wise?

For the same reason that the Lewis didn't connect.

Well, firstly, I work and have worked for most of my career in the public sector.

I have been one of these people, right?

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