The Premature State: Why Ireland Can’t Build Itself

0:00Just a quick heads up on the podcast. We will be talking to the brilliant, brilliant innovative thinker Sinead O'Sullivan about her views of what can be done to fix Ireland. And again, the issue is, why do we have this incredible standard of living and this lamentable quality of life? Why is Ireland a rich country that feels poor? It's not just economics, it's data, it's anthropology, it's history, it's society, all put together. Don't miss it. It's coming up in a couple of minutes.

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1:40To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. How are you doing there? It's time for the podcast and we have a very very important podcast coming up because we are going to not some showcase but we're going to interview Sinead O'Sullivan who is a brilliant brilliant young economist, former engineer, MBA holder from the Harvard Business School, a master's in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech and a very very brilliant thinker. who has driven a coach and horses through Establishment Ireland's very, very cozy view of the problems of this country.

2:29Okay? So we're going to talk to Sinead in a couple of minutes. The reason is she wrote a brilliant substack highlighting why she believes Ireland is a premature state. Not a mature state, a premature, that we haven't matured. And the gap between what people hear about the country being the richest country or the second year and their daily, daily experience of housing, of traffic, of health, etc., etc., that gap can be explained. I'm going to let her talk about it by an inability to build institutions, proper institutions, and everything flows from that. Now, what I found really interesting, and one of the reasons I wanted to have her on this show, was because of the reaction of official Ireland to her.

3:21Right. Which was? Which was, of course, undermining, to undermine all the time. So, what I hate... Why? Let me just talk about it. Yeah. Knit pickers. Do you know what a knit picker is? Okay. Not a nose picker. I know. A knit picker, right? A nitpicker is a sure first sign of a third-rate mind. People who nitpick have third-rate minds. And the reason it is, is because their whole energy is diverted towards undermining the big thinker, right? Yeah. So they're always looking at minute technical inaccuracies, perceived inaccuracies, minutiae, tiny little details. And what they do, so the big thinker comes out with this courageous, ambitious notion, look, this is what explains the world.

4:20The little thinker, the nitpicker, gets threatened by that, okay? They're insecure, they're not imaginatively, they're not emotionally or intellectually ambitious enough or, dare I say, clever enough to do the big thinking. And we know a lot of them. So what they do is they try to say, okay, I am going to look at the data. So Sinead wrote this piece. She probably should have used a thing called GNI, which is a more accurate indicator of Irish wealth than GDP, right? Okay, yeah. That's, I don't know what she said was fine. Change it. But the conclusion is absolutely the same, which is that Ireland is missing something fundamental.

5:01Yeah. How can you be so rich and have such second and third rate public services and public infrastructure? So if she used GNP, or sorry, GNI. The GNI star. Yeah, so if she used the GNI, it would have been, the results might have been slightly different. Slightly different. But the general trust of her point is the same. Would be exact. So the nitpicker arrives in. These little wankers arrive in because they've had a go at me. So this is a personal thing, right? Right. I've had a go at you. I'm not a nitpicker. No, yeah, but you're not. But you're a big... You're just my old mate. You can have a go at me all the time.

5:36Your job is to say, you see that little pedestal you're on now? I'm going to fucking knock you down. That's your job, right? But you're absolutely right. The nitpicker basically stifles any constructive discourse. This is the whole thing. They want to reduce the public confidence in the dissenter, in this case, Sinead. and they want to undermine the credibility of somebody who comes up with a big idea. That's the first thing. They also want to distract, as you said, from the main idea, the big argument. So they want to just chip, chip, chip, chip, chip and gradually undermine the confidence of the individual, but also the confidence of the recipient of the individual's ideas, the people who are reading, in this case, her stuff, right?

6:21And it's amazing the reaction from official art. All these fellows, middle-aged lads, on the public payroll, right? All on the payroll, the state payroll, can be counted on to have a pile on against one woman working on her own, doing stuff, not because she wants to. Bully boy tactics. Absolutely bully boy. And of course, their whole idea is to shift the debate away from the problem and onto something else. And of course, what they really want to do is they want to ignore the big picture idea. ignore the main substantive, novel, imaginative part of the argument. And of course, the problem with that is that nitpicking in economics undermines progress.

7:06Because progress is messy. Progress is going to be incomplete. Big ideas are going to be, for example, they could be undermined by nitpicking. But the idea is how do you get to big ideas? You have to throw caution to the wind. You have to sit back. You have to take out a very big palette and paint in a loose, loose way. And these guys just are incapable of doing that. But those guys also, it strikes me, are the ones who should have come up with these ideas and this kind of analysis that Sinead has done in the first place. They're not able to. Maybe that's it. But also, as you talk about nitpicking, nitpicking seems to be a uh a trait a general trait in irish politics and probably politics in irish economics as well right okay very much but it reminds me of you know this i'm going back a little bit but it was sometime last why does that not surprise me but it was sometime last year i can't remember exactly remember they were forming the new government and there was weeks and weeks spent on speaking rights.

8:16And it was all about two minutes here and eight minutes there. And I can't remember the detail of it. Call the government and get it done. Exactly. And when I was listening to this, and it's just went on for weeks, like, who cares? And from a public perspective, who cares? Get on with it. Fix the stuff. Well, I mean, that's just, again, that's the minutiae. I would say that was more of a negotiating tactic by people to say, look, we want a little bit more of this and a little bit more and they hide it but you're absolutely right it's kind of irrelevant i mean yeah the whole point scoring the whole idea here is that nitpickers are obsessed by focusing on trivial minor details exactly that don't actually matter but the objective of the nitpicker is to undermine the big thinker right to basically say you get back in your box my in this case my econometrics is better than yours and if I wouldn't have used that data point and you're like give me a break I mean this is part of the process of progress yeah is risk-taking intellectual risk taking financial risk-taking innovative risk-taking and the whole idea is the nitpicker wants to stifle creativity now if the nitpicker is also on the government payroll they're paid by think tanks or what have you, right?

9:39Well, then what you do is they are using government time that we are paying for to undermine an independent individual who is trying to do some good. So all I can say is that when I saw Sinead O'Sullivan being the focus of the wrath of these rather insubstantive thinkers, I decided she's doing something right. The RAF in the Second World War, the Brits, they used to say that about taking flack is you only take the flack when you're over the target. When you actually have something to say. And it was also the other thing that you said before, which is never let the perfect bully the good. Exactly, exactly.

10:24And the problem with the nitpickers, right? Bit of Russo there, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Right, I'm liking your French worldview there. A bit of Al Russo in the morning. I just love a bit of that. You get in the podcast, you get in the podcast. But just to come back to it, it creates a sort of resentment, right? And they're trying to foster resentment. They're trying to undermine the big person, you know? It's Gulliver and the Lilliputians, John. Yes. That's what it is. There's the image we have. So on that, let us go and talk to Sinead O'Sullivan about this extraordinarily brilliant piece of original thinking that she published last week and that got the reaction of the nitpickers, which so substantiated in my mind the fact that she is on the right track.

11:15Now on the line, we have a woman who has been through the ringer this week. She has been subject to the nitpickers convention and that is always, as I said, a good sign because it means you're doing something right. Sinead O'Sullivan, how are you? What a week you've had. Yeah, I'm good, David. Thanks for having me on. It's been an unusual week for me. So on Thursday, we did a podcast which is related to an article that I had scribbled last week, which was really about accountability and what is happening in Ireland, etc. And then just by way of background to our listeners, Sinead produced a graph and then a subsequent piece on our substack, which we will talk about in a couple of minutes, which I thought was a devastatingly accurate...

12:03not even rendition, it definitely the accurate assessment of where Ireland is as a country. And I suppose what we're talking about is this idea that we're told we're very rich, we're told we're doing all the right things, and yet people's quality of lives, their daily experience, is that of a second-tier country. Now, Sinead put this into a chart. This went viral. The chart was amazing. I'm going to let you explain it now in a second. And then all hell broke loose. So let's talk about the article, the chart, the claim, the idea, the big picture before we escape from the nitpickers. I mean, the big picture is, and anybody living in Ireland will know this, there is a massive difference between what we are told about how wealthy we are and how we experience that wealth through our day-to-day lives.

12:57And so, for example, you will constantly hear Ireland is the second wealthiest country in the EU. But somebody living in Ireland only feels the lack of public transport. We don't have good rail connections. We still have not been able to build a metro system. 75 % of GPs are closed when I moved back to Ireland for a year and I subsequently left. I could not access a GP. Just a basic lack of everyday things that you need to create some semblance of a good quality of life are not there. And this stark difference between how wealthy Ireland is on paper and how wealthy we are in our everyday lives is creating this enormous pent-up energy, let's call it.

13:37And this energy is starting to come out. And we will discuss that later, but that's the big idea, that there is this gap between what we are on paper and what we are in reality. So what you think is, this is a government or a system. This is the interesting thing about your article. You're basically talking, you're talking history. you're talking anthropology, you're talking economics, you're talking complex systems, you're talking about the whole gamut of inputs that goes to creating a society. And what you're saying is that we are a premature country. This is what I found fascinating. Explain this to the listeners, the notion of a premature country.

14:14Yeah. So most of my academic research actually focuses on premature markets. So for example, where you might have a technology, let's say solar power in space because I come from the space sector, right? So this technology could, in theory, exist. I just want to stop there. Nobody in this podcast has ever said I come from the space sector. I love it. We've had a lot of spacers. We've had a lot of spacers. So go on. It's a lovely image. So let's think about industrial strategy, right? So we have solar power in space, but why is there no commercial market around this? And my industrial strategy academic work will say, well, because there is this gap that exists.

14:55It is a premature market, which means that the technology is there, but it doesn't matter how much money you throw at this technology. The standards aren't there. The interoperability isn't there. The basic legal system isn't there. All of these boring things that create an industry are not there. So this is why and how I think about markets. You can bring this up a level and then use this to think about states. And this is what I've done with Ireland. I've basically said, Ireland has loads of money, yet we lack the basic infrastructure that creates a state. And it's those really boring things that never make the headlines.

15:34Procedures, mechanism, protocols, policies. Again, in the security, I work in security and defense a lot. I recently did an audit of Ireland's security mechanisms. A basic state has around 45. Ireland only has two of those right now. So we are missing the basic infrastructure that creates a state. And the difference between, I guess, the wealth that we have and the infrastructure and the architecture of a state that we have is what I call this gap. But this is Ireland as a premature state. The question that follows this is why? Why is Ireland lacking this basic stuff that everyone else has in terms of government capacity?

16:15And 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, okay, where does this naturally take us? And that's quite worrying. So let's explore the why. Let's explore the why. We've been an independent country for over a hundred years. 70 years was a pretty much an abject failure, at least from the headline economic numbers. the last 30 years has seen a turnaround, at least again in headline economic numbers. Why do you think that Ireland hasn't put together these basic blocks of statehood, which other European countries have?

16:56Yeah, 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.

17:35But 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 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, and I had a discussion about this recently, if you look at the infrastructure that we have actually built.

18:15So 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 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 over, you know, kind of overtaken or overseen by an external party.

19:00And 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. It's quite substantial pocket money, but I take your point.

19:38More than I ever got. Sinead, I'm sorry for cutting you off there, because I find this type of big thinking really really attractive because when things are inexplicable on a basic managerial level you say okay why can't we build a metro you know for god's sake you know the spaniards can build metros they're coming up you know the italians they're french etc and you think okay is this just rooted in a basic inability to project manage a system or is this coming from as you say, a sort of an outsourcing of the responsibility of statehood that we have done again and again and again. We've misdiagnosed, I think you wrote in your piece, a large budget surplus for wealth, or we've misdiagnosed tax revenue as being wealth.

20:27And as a result of that, everything is being, to use that very technical term, pissed away. Yeah, we're like a drunken sailor. I mean, that is our fiscal policy. Yes, well, let's get back to that. We have just had, for example, as we know, the protests, right? And the solution to the protests is a three-month subsidy, which will cost three-quarters of a billion euros for buying three months' time. But that is not a strategy. So let's talk about, use that as an example of the thinking. 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.

21:14So people will say, well, short-term thinking, short-term solutions, get to the next voting block or election, throw a bit of money at people. And we absolutely do this. There's no doubt about the fact that we pay for votes essentially, along with many other things. But there's another framing that I want to use here, because I actually think that this is potentially more useful for understanding the problem. And by the way, we want to understand the problem to eventually solve it. So we're not just hurlers in the ditch here throwing shit at the wall. Like we're actually trying to figure out what is the actual problem we're trying to solve for.

21:49And so another way of looking at this is, in its most basic form, that the government can do two things. It can build things and it can spend money. And, you know, in my kind of more formal frameworks, I say that there are two mechanisms that are both required within an economy. One is a coordination mechanism. And usually it is the state, although recently we can talk about that perhaps later, the markets have done that more. But there has to be some sort of mechanism for coordinating all of this activity. The other thing downstream of that after it's been coordinated is that you have to distribute the proceeds of this economy and what we got really good at doing and okay let's let's let's let's talk about what ireland's good at doing lots of things i mean lots of people will be listening to this from outside ireland okay so lots of foreigners who are wanting to come here who have come here who see lots of immigrants coming here who see lots of opportunity for example i was just teaching a course in trinity a kind of a master's course most of those students are foreigners.

22:57They want to work here. So there's a lot of things. There's a certain dynamism in Ireland that is hard to put your finger on, but it's here, right? And side by side with that, Sinead, is this mad, chaotic, inefficient, frustrating inability to get the building blocks right. And then, so it's a bizarre tapestry of inconsistencies. Yeah. Well, let's get back to the fuel protests and this three-month mini solution, right? What we might one day call, or might popularly call short-termism, is actually the fact that the government are just really good at distributing things. We never really learned how to coordinate anything because whether it was the British Empire, the EU, the Catholic Church, did all that coordination for us.

23:49But we are, we do have a really strong, muscle when it comes to distributing proceeds. And so the first and pretty much the only tool that the government has when it comes to problem solving, and this is a very, by the way, this is one of the more complex problems that the government has had to solve in many years. And the tools that they have are binary, right? They can't coordinate anything, which requires extraordinary skill and is built through institutions over decades. But we're good at distributing capital. And in this case, it's a subsidy and it's a three month subsidy. So, so whether you want to call it a short term thinking, I like to think of it in terms of, it's another distribution, it's another distribution, but all of our problems are coordination problems.

24:36And so we don't have the tools. We cannot fix a coordination problem with a distribution tool, which is subsidy spending. So it's always, it's, yes, it's short term but in the long term the problem is this is this is what you're doing is you're putting sort of an intellectual engineering framework into this idea of just throw money at it we hear this all the time just throw money at it the american multinationals are throwing off all this extra cash which isn't earned in ireland it isn't wealth created it's an extractive industry so it's in effect like having you know an oil find or a gas find or whatever right and that then allows an enormous amount of money to come into the public purse and therefore the government possibly unique in western europe is able to lean on the distribution side because we have the cash but all the while we're becoming infantilized is that your actual key point there's an infantilization of the system which is a result of too much pocket money and the children are in charge and the adults have left the field.

25:42Yeah. I mean, in Ireland's case, the adults were never here. I mean, the adults were external, right? So like we were never the adults. And I don't know, like, are we just a bunch of orphans? Like, I don't know what's going on here. But yes, I mean, this is essentially it. We have never needed the skill before. So we don't even recognize when we don't have it. And this is why people intuitively, when I wrote the Substack, I did not talk about it in these ways. But people will, if you have left Ireland, if you have lived in other places, and let's say, you know, or maybe you're from another place and you experience Ireland, that is exactly what you're feeling.

26:21This, this missing something and you see it everywhere and you feel it like, oh, the bus didn't come and there's no train. And why can't I buy this thing here? Why can't I tap onto the bus with my phone and I get it from every other normal country? It is this missing coordination part that we just have never had here. And so this is what you're feeling. This is the missing infrastructure. So let's look at, because the coordination bit requires, as you say, decades of thinking, of institutional structures, of institutional credibility, of talent, of producing an entire cohort, a technical cohort of people who can do this stuff.

27:06Like I was thinking many, many years ago, if you read anything about Napoleonic France, Napoleon had this amazing idea very early in the 19th century that we need to create a technocratic class to run this technocratic government. And this means science, we need the hot take call. We need to bias lots of our thinking towards institutional engineering, all that sort of stuff. It takes a long, long time. And is it possible to short circuit this? I mean it has to be because we have no choice we have nothing but no I want to get back to what you're saying it's really interesting very few people think about it like this so I come at these problems as you said from an engineering perspective I just happen to have been an engineer before as an economist so this is a very natural framing for me but what you're saying is exactly right when you meet political leadership France is a really good example of this they have gone, they have spent years in the top, top, top institutions to move before they can move into the politics side of things.

28:08They have to, and they have this incredibly deep understanding of how complex systems work. When you see a failure in one part of the system, they intuitively understand that the solution is ultimately going to lie perhaps very far away from it because they understand the complexity of things in general. It is this kind of logic-based engineering background. Now, we just don't have that. We have a very different type of, I mean, I would say in Ireland, and this is not a class thing. This is just a kind of, this is kind of an outside in looking at it fact that we don't have that kind of intellectual layer of politics because firstly, Ireland is, we're one step away from an agrarian economy, although if we didn't have this multinational tax.

28:53So a lot of our politics is local politics, and it is rural. And it doesn't vibe with the institutional and intellectual thinking that we see in other places. We don't have the class system that Paris has. And my God, they do have a class system. So we're different. And there's no point in saying we should become the Nordics, we should become Paris. But we need to become what we're not right now in Ireland. And someone needs to do some sort of honest assessment of what that is. It takes a very long time. This is why it's very hard for us to compare ourselves with the others. This is why there's a gap because these countries have existed.

29:31I mean, Ireland has existed as a country for a long time. We have not existed as a functioning state for, I don't know, if ever. That is a bold claim, but maybe it's true. So a different type of thinking is involved here. But I think the first thing is understanding what the actual problem is. And And that's, I think it feels palpable in Ireland that people are starting to understand that maybe this is the problem. But, but, but, you know, Ireland has to figure this out in its own way. And before we can actually figure out how to solve things, and I'm not one of these people that's like, here's a long list of problems.

30:06I'm not concerned about the solutions. I am. But I guess my point is that we, before we jump to the solutions, we need to understand in the Irish context? What is the actual problem that we're solving here? And then what is the Irish way that we can do this? Because we're not, we don't have time. We do not have the developmental path that these other countries had for hundreds of years. So we're going to have to get smart about this, but it has to happen. Because it's fascinating you say that, Sinead, many years ago, I worked for a large French organization. And the very first thing we had was a thing called an organigram.

30:42okay and the organigram was basically an engineering structure into which the whole organization well you became a sort of a cog in that big machine so you you had a place in the in the structure and this was very much the engineering now initially the irish person was like oh for fuck's sake you know i went back in school you know etc etc i'm a professional but then you realize actually no this is the way you run large multinational companies right it was a big bank and I was talking I was talking you know this is pathetic this is this is this is adolescent you know la la la and then you know actually no if something goes wrong in this part and this part there is a system that kicks into place to fix things but what I want to ask you about is the reaction to because what really disappointed me this week was the reaction of official Ireland to you, a woman, an economist, an engineer, a citizen acting on her own, putting out something off her own bat.

31:47And rather than say, wow, this is interesting. This is somebody who's thinking at a level which we know we need to think about at this level, at this angle. The official reaction was nitpicking. Oh my God, her data isn't good. My econometrics is better than yours. It was a pylon of official Ireland against you. Right. And I know what this feels like. Right. But this is again, you're getting to the crux of the issue rather than address the questions that are being asked and the big, big issue that has been excavated here. We try to shut you down. It's not surprising. And I'll tell you why. When I lived in Ireland, again, I emigrated a long time ago, and I thought I would try it out, test drive it again for a year.

32:40And it didn't work out for me for many of the reasons that I've written about in my piece. It was too hard trying to live there. I couldn't find anywhere to live. But while I was there, I wrote about this. I wrote about my experience and I had a similar reaction. And in fact, there was this kind of hashtag at the time, which was, you know, Ireland hater. I was called an Ireland hater. And I hate that because I love Ireland. I want to be able to live there, but I can't right now. I got hundreds of emails from people who, like me, live overseas and desperately want to move back, but have nothing to move back to.

33:20There's nothing to move into. There's no economy in which to get that job that they have elsewhere. They can't get a house. And a few years later, you know, writing this time about Ireland and the reaction was very similar. But it's disappointing for a few different reasons. One is that I don't have an institution behind me when I write this. It's me. It's me arsing around with data and numbers and using my time and my energy to push Ireland to be a better place. I'm not an Ireland hater. I would argue that the people who deny the existence of these problems are doing much more damage to Ireland than the person who's highlighting them.

34:02The other thing is I genuinely believe in participatory democracy and I myself am actively involved in this. I'm doing multiple projects at the minute whereby I'm creating enormous amounts of policies and auditing stuff that's there and looking at what are the basics that we're missing. and not only to highlight a problem, but I'm actively engaged in creating the solution. Just this morning, it's my birthday. I'm spending the day creating draft legislation for something that no one really cares about, but that I do. And so I'm not one of these people that's hurling, you know, I'm just, I believe that we should be open to an open discussion around What is the problem?

34:50Let's discuss it. And why do people feel gaslighted 24-7? These problems exist. Maybe some parts of official Ireland don't feel them every day because they have excluded themselves from an environment in which they become more real, but they're there. Don't deny other people's experience of that. I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, just so you know, listeners, the reaction from certain quarters to Sinead's piece was, I think, as a citizen, pathetic. Because what it did, and I've seen it all the time, the big thinker comes up and says, look, we have a serious problem that we have to digest, we have to analyze, we have to fix at some level of urgency.

35:35And the nitpicker who is actually benefiting from this dysfunctional state, who is probably working in a large state-sanctioned, publicly financed think tank and our outfit like that, decides, okay, this woman's a threat because she's exposing. So let's try and nitpick our way to chip away at her credibility by saying, well, I wouldn't have done it like this, or I wouldn't have done it like this, or had you done this. And suddenly what you see is you see exactly the neurotic, insecure reaction of people who are afraid to look at the big picture and afraid to actually create a framework which might allow Irish people to see, why can't I get a house?

36:20Why am I 35 and I'm living in a flat share with my boyfriend or girlfriend that I really wouldn't like? I would like a little one bedroom place of my own. Why am I living with my mum and dad and I'm 31 and I've got a good job? Why am I stuck in traffic? why are these protesters on the m50 able to actually shut the country down and why is the reaction to this let's just throw money at it because we can't think of a better way to do it so i think that what you've done sinead is a national service you've done the state some service that the last person who suggested that was charlie howie i won't put you in that particular back but I'd say thank you very much for this this where can our listeners find your work I mean I know your sub stack but please tell the listeners because it's it's great stuff and it's by the way listener it's across everything it's engineering it's dynamics it's complex systems it's data it's economics it's politics it's all sorts of stuff uh it's yeah it's confused is what it is.

37:23So yes, you can read my work on my sub stack, www.butthistime.com. And yeah, I mean, I, you know, I, I, I encourage people to get involved, to, to talk about it, to engage with it, play around with data. I mean, AI exists now, you know, ask, you put together your own stuff. I mean, there is nothing more powerful than people who can actually see under the hood. And now we can finally do that. And, and if things feel like they're not working, look at the data and figure out why and email your TD about it. I, you know, so, so you can find me online, but also nobody needs me or my framework to do this.

38:04Everyone can and should do it. And I think for so long, we haven't. And I think now we're, we're really starting to find a voice and say, hang on a minute, let's fix this problem. So yes, I appreciate your support, David. I wish, I wish official Ireland or as forward-thinking as you are. Well, on that mutually self-congratulatory note, which should never happen on this thing. No, but Sinead, it's really good. I mean, it's great stuff. Thank you so much. Your bloody birthday, the last thing you need on your birthday, if you're writing policy documents and talking to the likes of me. Yes, happy birthday.

38:36So happy birthday, Sinead. That's the first thing, right? And maybe by this time next year, who knows, things might be moving a little bit better. Great stuff. Listen, thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

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40:35Some birthday she's having. Well, I mean, that's the thing. but do you know what there's there are many people john who their idea of a birthday present is to come in the day well that's true that's true yeah the best present she could have got exactly but it's interesting because we've been talking about this for throughout the podcast since its inception yes you know about uh infrastructure and and our inability to make things work in ireland yeah but it's also interesting that is echoes of do you remember Dan Wong that was on before engineering guy about China exactly and she has that engineering mind and an economist mind and so perhaps that makes it easier for her to see that perspective when you were talking about the nitpickers they are the paid bloodhounds of the Irish establishment, attack dogs that's all they are and their whole objective is to bring somebody like that down yeah yeah and and it's so sickening actually so awful yeah and the fact that they're usually middle-aged blokes having to go to younger woman just for me it's it reeks of all sorts of things the problem is that these solutions are never simple they are complex problems they don't require one specific catch-all solution the data is important i don't undermine that at all yeah because that's my training.

42:03But what I want to do is I want our listeners to say, hold on a second. That was a very, very substantive discussion about explaining how did we get to this situation where we have buckets of money and we don't seem to be able to do what buckets of money should allow us to do. And when we were younger, it was always the argument, well, Ireland can't build a motorway system, which we've just built. Our island can't build a train system. Our island can't be, because we've no money. So suck it up and emigrate. Now what we're saying to the kids is we've loads of money, but we can't build your houses, so suck it up and emigrate.

42:44Think about it. And that's what she's basically, in effect, saying. I thought it was interesting, her analysis of, you know, the fact, her premature Ireland, that we have never grown up, because we've never had to grow up. Because we've had our pocket money from either the Brits or from the Catholic Church when they were running the... Running the show. Yeah, pretty much. They were running the show, yeah. Yeah, and then the EU and now the multinationals. Actually, just an interesting point on the Catholic Church and the nuns running the health system. My mum always said... She was a nurse, yeah.

43:19Yeah, and she always said, yeah, they ran it really well, but they ran it like the military. And they were kind of cruel, But the minute they kind of left, the whole thing kind of fell apart. So John is advocating that we go back to a situation where every single ward of the hospital would be named after a saint, right? Or a moving statue of some sort. And there would be a matron with one of those old 1950s nuns hats. You know what they could have squared things? They'd have them look like Spanish dictators. You know, the three-pronged hats, right? Ooh, matron. But the point Sinead is making is that they operated in isolation.

44:02So they're all siloed. So the health system was siloed. The education system was siloed. The justice system was siloed. The moral authority was siloed. And there was no organigram, as the French would have, to say this is a complex system. It's an ecology. It's a sensitive ecosystem, et cetera. But let's come back to our point, is that we have outsourced statehood to a variety of external operators, the latest incarnation of which is the multinationals. What that has done, it's allowed us to misdiagnose or to spin an excess of tax revenue as being equivalent to national wealth. And what she's saying, it is not.

44:48National wealth are the public assets of the country. The train system, the education system, the health system, the defense system, which was going to come under extraordinary scrutiny on the 12th of July, as we said the other day, right? Okay. The ability to build, the ability to provide. But again, come back, to provide houses for people, to plan, to say, look, our population is now 5 million. We have the problems of a society of 5 million. That means building a new city. That means planning for a new city to have infrastructure. That means taking somewhere, let's say like Athlone, and say that's the centre of the country.

45:30Let's build a new city there. To be in some way self-sufficient. To be self-sufficient, not to be always dependent on. Exactly. Because also when you are always dependent on, you're always trying to play the best boy in the class. Yeah. Because you're basically a lick arse. But you're compromised on every decision. So again, what we're saying is that Ireland does extraordinarily well on lots of things. Yeah. Which is why we have this growing economy, which is why we have the opportunity, which is why, as I said, when I was teaching in Trinity last week, most of the students were foreigners who want to stay here because they said you can do things in Ireland you can't do elsewhere.

46:09So we have this dynamic, chaotic, freewheeling, free-thinking part of the society that works. But on the other hand, you have no planning, which is generating a quality of life commensurate with the standard of living. And this, I think, is where we will leave it, John, because you're about to apply for your permanent residency to Australia. and you're going to emigrate in your later years. Yes, with my surfboard. Exactly. All right, we'll talk to you Tuesday.

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