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.

Appearances

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

When you meet political leadership, France is a really good example of this.

They have gone, they have spent years in the top, top, top institutions.

Before they can move into the politics side of things, they have to, and they have this incredibly deep understanding of how complex systems work.

When you see a failure in one part of the system, they intuitively understand that the solution is ultimately going to lie perhaps very far away from it because they understand the complexity of things in general.

It is this kind of logic-based engineering background.

Now,

We just don't have that.

We have a very different type of, I mean, I would say in Ireland, and this is not a class thing, this is just a kind of, this is kind of an outside in looking at it fact that we don't have that kind of intellectual layer of politics because firstly, Ireland is, we're one step away from an agrarian economy, although if we didn't have these multinational tax issues.

So a lot of our politics is local politics and it is rural.

And it doesn't vibe with the institutional and intellectual thinking that we see in other places.

We don't have the class system that Paris has.

And my God, they do have a class system.

So we're different.

And there's no point in saying we should become the Nordics.

We should become Paris.

But we need to become what we're not right now in Ireland.

And someone needs to do some sort of honest assessment of what that is.

It takes a very long time.

This is why it's very hard for us to compare ourselves with the others.

This is why there's a gap because these countries have existed.

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