Sinead O'Sullivan

The question that follows this is, why?

Why is Ireland lacking this basic stuff that everyone else has in terms of government capacity?

And a lot of that gets back into where we as a country have come from.

And that, to me, is the worrying part, because when you understand where we've come from and what we're lacking today, then you think, OK, where does this naturally take us?

And that's quite worrying.

Yeah, I mean, you know, basically we can look at our history and see that quite a lot of this has to do with where we come from, not necessarily of where we are today.

So like, for example, we were a former, we are a former British colony.

And so for many, many years, we did not independently get to make decisions about what infrastructure we're building, how we're spending money, what that money goes on, what our assets, our resources are, because those were made for us on behalf of us.

That is, in effect,

the nature of what a colony was back then and what it meant to be colonialized.

We then managed to kind of get rid of the British colony, but then something interesting happened.

And that gap was filled by other institutions.

In Ireland, it was really the Catholic church.

So the Catholic church had a huge involvement in the planning capacity that a state would usually do.

They were involved in education heavily.

They were involved in healthcare hospitals and

And this kind of filled that gap temporarily.

Now, another strange kind of thing happened as religion started to leave a lot of the planning aspects of the government.

We became an EU member state.

And if you look actually quite interestingly, I had a discussion about this recently.