Sinead O'Sullivan

So, you know, I want to zoom out a little bit here because I think this is actually important and the context here is actually very enlightening.

So, I mean, not to take us on too much of a detour back into history, but as many of your listeners will indeed know, we are a former, Ireland is a former colony of the British Empire.

So we were effectively run from the UK or from Britain for a long time.

When Britain left, we were subsequently, a lot of our services, so for example, healthcare, hospitals, education, budgets, were run by the Catholic Church.

And what happened in the 90s was that the Catholic Church fell away and the EU stepped in.

And the EU said, OK, Ireland, it's time to update your infrastructure.

If you want to be a proper EU member state, you're going to need roads.

And here are the 10 basic things that a country needs in terms of infrastructure.

Here's the mandate to do it.

Here's how to do it.

And here's the money to do it.

And we built those.

And then the multinationals came in and gave us money.

So we've never had to actually build the institutions themselves.

to build things.

And this is what I call this institutional architectural gap.

We have never needed to grow up because we've always had the parent giving us the pocket money.

In this case, you know, the pocket money just happens to be billions of euros.

So we've never actually had to generate this wealth ourselves.

And we've never needed to