The Pat Kenny Show
In Ireland, why do we find it so hard to make progress on infrastructure?
18 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
In Ireland, nothing gets us talking like lions. Tea? Small talk. Well Jimmy, shock on weather we're having. Big talk. Even I could have played county. Office talk.
I'm MIA in the AM, but I'll circle back on the KPIs.
Real talk.
Milk before tea.
Should be a criminal offence. You could say we talk too much, but the truth is, we don't talk nearly enough. Lions puts the talk into tea. The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk.
Now, what's the connection between the fuel protests and young people emigrating to Melbourne? My next guest is an Irish business economist, formerly of the Harvard Business School, who posted her theory online. And it was soon being discussed widely, among the people talking about it, Steve Bannon on his podcast. And she's going to tell us all about it.
Will you welcome to the program Sinead O'Sullivan. Sinead, good morning. Good morning. How are you? I'm very well. Now, tell me about the graph that you posted, which has perplexed and perturbed many people.
So, yes, I mean, so a lot of the work that I do in various different sectors and various spaces looks at basically this gap between what we want and what we have and what we can do. And so with Ireland in particular, and, you know, especially discussing things around the fuel protests,
One of the things that I'm fully aware of is that Ireland has a very ambitious plan for what it wants to do and unfortunately severely under delivers on that plan. So what I was trying to better understand and what I've since discussed through my blog post, which has ruffled some feathers,
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Chapter 2: What is the connection between fuel protests and emigration to Melbourne?
We're well up. We're at between 130 and 140. Maybe Denmark is slightly ahead of us on that score. But when you look at the graph in total, we are the complete outlier because we are the wealthiest almost, but we're also the poorest in terms of infrastructure and all the other things that we want. And the question is, with all that wealth, why can't we deliver?
Yeah, it's an interesting question. And this graph really gets to the point of what do we mean by wealth? So for many years, we kind of hear these top line numbers about our tax revenue, about how well we're doing in terms of literacy and longevity and outcomes. But what I'm actually interested in is not the actual outcomes, but the infrastructure that we have.
So what impacts us all day every day? How long is our commute to work? How many cars do people have to own to be able to get around? What is the cost of our health care? Can we actually even go to see the GP? I mean, I actually moved to Ireland. I've spent most of my career working in the U.S.
When I moved to Ireland for a year and have subsequently left because of some of the issues discussed in that article, I could not get a GP. It's quite extraordinary.
I mean, I read from your blog the things that you talk about and what people feel, what might drive them to Melbourne.
The three-hour commute and traffic, the closed GP list, the €2,200 rent, the 14-month wait for an MRI, the buses that don't come, and we'll be talking to the CEO of Dublin Bus later on in the programme, the trains that don't exist, the schools with no places, the pubs that close before midnight, the €12 sandwiches. That says it all.
This is a lifestyle. Ultimately, you know, people might say, well, Ireland, in Ireland, we have extraordinarily good, I guess we live the longest, you know, or some of our health issues.
outcomes are the best in europe but my argument to that would be we might live for a very long time but we live at a low quality of life in these everyday mundane things that actually determine how happy we are on a day-to-day basis now the question is why are these missing and who is supposed to provide them and in my article i go into great depth about well the government is supposed to provide these very basic things
And because the government has simply not provided them, we have all found these kind of weird workarounds. So, for example, people will buy two cars instead of having one. We know in the richest European capitals, people have zero cars. So having more cars is actually not an indicator of wealth. it is an indicator of a lack of wealth and a lack of prosperity.
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Chapter 3: How does Sinead O'Sullivan explain Ireland's infrastructure issues?
So why can't our governments spend the money in a way that benefits the citizen?
So, you know, I want to zoom out a little bit here because I think this is actually important and the context here is actually very enlightening. So, I mean, not to take us on too much of a detour back into history, but as many of your listeners will indeed know, we are a former, Ireland is a former colony of the British Empire.
So we were effectively run from the UK or from Britain for a long time. When Britain left, we were subsequently, a lot of our services, so for example, healthcare, hospitals, education, budgets, were run by the Catholic Church. And what happened in the 90s was that the Catholic Church fell away and the EU stepped in. And the EU said, OK, Ireland, it's time to update your infrastructure.
If you want to be a proper EU member state, you're going to need roads. And here are the 10 basic things that a country needs in terms of infrastructure. Here's the mandate to do it. Here's how to do it. And here's the money to do it. And we built those. And then the multinationals came in and gave us money. So we've never had to actually build the institutions themselves. to build things.
And this is what I call this institutional architectural gap. We have never needed to grow up because we've always had the parent giving us the pocket money. In this case, you know, the pocket money just happens to be billions of euros. So we've never actually had to generate this wealth ourselves. And we've never needed to
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Chapter 4: Why does Ireland struggle with basic infrastructure despite wealth?
decide ourselves to build something because somebody else has always made that decision for us. So now the EU is not here. Britain is not here. The Catholic Church is less involved in Irish way of life. And we're left with a government that's saying, hang on a second, why can we not build anything? Because they've never built anything before.
Well, time was back in the 30s, they built housing estates, they built houses, social housing for many, many people, and many families grew up in those social houses. They, of course, then sold off that stock of social housing, meaning it had to be replaced, sometimes by local authorities, but not that much, and mostly by the private sector. So we make a lot of mistakes.
But when the state does something, and the best example I can give is The Children's Hospital, which costs far too much money, is in the wrong place and has taken forever to construct compared to other examples in different jurisdictions. We are embarking on a metro after a delay of perhaps two decades. I mean, how do we build the infrastructure to build the infrastructure?
We're many layers in deep here. So I want to, again, come to one main point, which is kind of connecting all of these things. So at the minute, I'm running a road safety campaign, and I'll give you one more data point to show you how far we are from the European average. The number of deaths on Irish roads is up 32%. year on year, the EU average is down 12%.
So why are we 44% away from the EU average? And that, you know, the number compared to the Nordics is just shocking. A lot of this, if you go by sector by sector and look at what we're missing in each of these, whether it's construction, whether it's hospitals, whether it's healthcare, road safety, a lot of this comes back to accountability.
A lot of the way that the Irish system has been created has been specifically designed, now whether intentionally or just as a byproduct of what it is, in a way that is so diffused that there is no responsibility or accountability onto one minister, one person, one form of leadership that says, I am responsible for this. I am accountable. It didn't happen. That is my problem.
Let's resolve a reform or restructure this. And it really doesn't matter which project. The bike shed is another good one.
The books always stop somewhere else. Isn't that it? It doesn't stop on the minister's desk or the official's desk. It stops somewhere else. And that is our problem.
There's a really good meme that's been going around for a couple of years on the internet. Maybe your listeners will have seen it. And it's, you know, there's six or seven Spider-Mans in a circle all pointing at each other with the masks on. And the idea is kind of that... No one is responsible. It's all the same person, but it's nobody.
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