Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I will give another couple of examples. The Minister for Justice promised there would be a policing review after the Dublin riots. It does not exist anymore. There are 4,000 empty local authority homes at the moment. It takes eight months for them to be returned to the market. It takes three weeks for a private rental home to be returned to the market. A planning application has not even gone in for the flood defences that were promised in Midleton in 2017. Some €20 million was spent on pointless referendums where Ministers blatantly misled the public. The M50 bridges were built for £53 million. Commuters are still paying billions of euro for those bridges.

The reality is that this Government is an accountability-free zone. We are cursed to wake up to a Groundhog Day of incompetence unless there is change in this regard. Accountability means there is a cost to an individual. We see all the reports and the meetings of the Committee of Public Accounts. However, unless there is a cost to individuals for making decisions that are wrong or where they are not fulfilling their job contracts, this is going to happen over and over again. I asked the Minister what accountability looks like to him. How will it be implemented? The reality is that the buck stops with the Government. The Minister is right that if we do not see accountability here, there will be accountability in the ballot box.

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