Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Ar an gcéad dul síos, ba mhaith liom mo chomhghairdeas a ghabháil leis an Teachta Shanahan ó Phort Láirge. I commend and congratulate Deputy Shanahan from my neighbouring constituency on this very insightful, thoughtful and necessary legislation. Our group is wholeheartedly supporting it. We have a litany of issues. It is probably repetitive at this stage. We have lost the competency to develop major projects. When I look back at the inception of the State, we had the great late TK Whitaker and visionaries like him who were able to develop projects with little resources. Take the electrification of rural Ireland or issues like that, or building our railways. We had a railway system we inherited from the British and it has been mainly dismantled since.

Our Departments have gotten so big and cumbersome, with Secretaries General on huge wages and a plethora of staff, secretaries, undersecretaries and senior officials and they have no clue what is going on. I could say worse but I do not believe they have. We built the M8 motorway and all of us here use it going home on the weekends and coming to Dublin. It is a fabulous project. God be with Pat Mulcair, a Limerick man. That project was on time and under budget. It was on time or ahead of time. We saw that work. Why can other projects not be done like that? What about the children's hospital? Nobody was held accountable for the HSE computers or the voting machine scandal. The children's hospital is on the Government's head but none of them are here now. We brought in the people who knew how to build hospitals and told the Government that was the wrong site and they all came and listened but then they came in here and voted for it. Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and all the other smaller parties on the left voted to go ahead on this site. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. It is the wrong site in the wrong place. Imagine being told sick children could come on the Luas. On your heads be it, and many other projects as well. The M24 Limerick-Waterford project is languishing and there is no sign of it. Other overruns are costing us money.

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