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 · Rich Country, Broken State · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

Because what I had kind of independently come to

I then decided to look at other much bigger reforms that had been tried in the past and failed.

And the failings that I had experienced, although to an incredibly smaller degree, were identical to what has publicly been said over and over and over again.

People screaming at the top of their lungs saying, hey, this is never going to work because of A, B, and C, and this needs to change.

And nothing changed.

And so the mechanism, as I've outlined in the piece, really comes down to four, what I've called blocks, that kind of all need to be present or four different aspects of reform that need to happen in order for a reform to actually hold or to take shape.

Yeah.

And, you know, none of them are complicated.

I mean, when I say them, people will think, oh, my God, like what she's saying is something that we all know.

But I'll say it anyway, because it's worth saying over and over again.

The first one is that there's no named person or kind of agent of delivery that has the mandate, but importantly, the responsibility and the ability to carry out those reforms.

Now, again, my personal experience on the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the board of directors have the responsibility to run the museum, but none of the actual authority to do that.

And this is what you see across the enormous size of the state, which is both government agencies, the civil service, and then

literally thousands of NGOs that participate in the delivery of public goods and services and infrastructure on the state's behalf.

So if there is no one person whose job it is to kind of stand up and say, I have the responsibility and the mandate and the ability and authority to do this, well, then no one's going to be able to do it.

And this kind of goes very much against what we see even in the U.K.,

Can you name a single person who's been fired from an NGO or the Irish government for screwing things up?

Not even screwing things up, but like just not getting them right.

You know, I mean, it's outstanding.

So exactly.

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