In Ireland, why do we find it so hard to make progress on infrastructure?
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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, is that we are an extraordinarily wealthy country, but yet we lack basic infrastructure that even, you know, much, much less wealthy countries than Ireland has.
And so the question is, why? Why is that? And in particular, I connected this lack of infrastructure and this kind of the everyday impact that that has on our lives to the fuel protests.
Okay, now I'm looking at the graph, and on the perpendicular axis, and I'm asking people to imagine this now, on the right-hand side, there's a perpendicular axis, and that shows infrastructure and public services composite score. And that's all the things that we like to have, and a lot of times we don't have here, but they have in other countries. And then on the bottom, you have wealth, GDP per capita index. and we are well up there. We're almost at the top of that particular horizontal line.
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.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:43
2
What is the connection between fuel protests and emigration to Melbourne?
2:43–6:59
3
How does Sinead O'Sullivan explain Ireland's infrastructure issues?
6:59–8:34
4
Why does Ireland struggle with basic infrastructure despite wealth?
8:34–13:29