Sinead O'Sullivan

if you look at the infrastructure that we have actually built so so part of the issue is that today that infrastructure firstly we haven't built new infrastructure but the existing infrastructure is not fit for purpose but but let's look at where that existing infrastructure came from and that in itself is interesting when we became an eu member state the eu basically said look you guys need roads or something like we have standards and i'm sorry but you're just not meeting them

So they gave us a list of things we had to do.

They gave us a list of how we should do them, when we should do them by, and they gave us money to do them.

And we did them.

So there again, that state capacity, the role of let's do something and let's build had been overtaken or overseen by an external party.

And then finally, we're at the kind of final stage of this brings us to today, which is the multinationals.

Again, we haven't independently created any of the wealth that we're experiencing.

We're getting it from elsewhere.

And it's again, this external hand that is moving the Irish market.

So if you remove the EU, if you remove the multinationals, if you remove the Catholic Church, and if you remove the British Empire,

We've never actually learned how to do this.

We are, you know, we are children with pocket money that we're spending.

More than I ever got.

Yeah, we're like a drunken sailor.

I mean...

That is our fiscal policy.

Yeah.

So some people might describe this as short-termism, right?

And this is the common narrative.

And I think it's good and it's useful, but it fails to actually understand what the real problem is.