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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

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The David McWilliams Podcast · The Premature State: Why Ireland Can’t Build Itself · 23 Apr 2026 podcast

There's no doubt about the fact that we pay for votes essentially, along with many other things.

But there's another framing that I want to use here because I actually think that this is potentially more useful for understanding the problem.

And by the way, we want to understand the problem to eventually solve it.

So we're not just hurlers on the ditch here throwing shit at the wall.

We're actually trying to figure out

What is the actual problem we're trying to solve for?

And so another way of looking at this is, in its most basic form, that the government can do two things.

It can build things and it can spend money.

And, you know, in my kind of more formal frameworks, I say that there are two mechanisms that are both required within an economy.

One is a coordination mechanism.

And usually it is the state, although recently we can talk about that perhaps later, the markets have done that more.

But there has to be some sort of mechanism for coordinating all of this activity.

The other thing downstream of that, after it's been coordinated, is that you have to distribute the proceeds of this economy.

And what we got really good at doing, and okay, let's talk about what Ireland's good at doing.

Yeah.

Well, let's get back to the fuel protests and this three month mini solution, right?

What we might one day call or, you know, might popularly call short termism is actually the fact that the government are just really good at distributing things.

We never really learned how to coordinate anything because whether it was the British Empire, the EU, the Catholic Church did all that coordination for us.

But we do have a really strong muscle when it comes to distributing proceeds.

And so the first and pretty much the only tool that the government has when it comes to problem solving, and this is a very, by the way, this is one of the more complex problems that the government has had to solve in many years.

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