Olivia King

“If” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The National Children’s Hospital was due in 2022. It will now be 2027... Let's be real December isn't happening. Five years late. Projected cost: over €2.2 BILLION. On track to be the MOST expensive hospital ever built per bed anywhere in the world 🌎 Here in Ireland. That's Father Ted level of mad. Meanwhile we are also failing all around us: • 16,700 people in emergency accommodation. Record high. Over 5,000 are children. • Average house price ~€380,000. Highest level ever recorded. • Average rent now over €2,000 per month nationally. Record high. • Our population has grown 9% since 2019. Hospital capacity has not kept pace. Not has schools. Gps. Roads. Transport. Etc. How can it when no leadership is in place. • Patients regularly spend 20+ hours on trolleys. Last week a very close elderly family member of mine waited 29 hours in Tallaght for a bed. While I witnessed the same all around me. Doctors and nurses are running on fumes. How they show up day in Day out is beyond me and they deserve better. They are running at max 24/7. They are dealing with critical illness, pain, frustration and sometimes anger from exhausted families. They deserve better working conditions. Our children, our elderly and our most vulnerable deserve better medical care. If we are building the most expensive hospital in the world, we should have the best system in the world and that should be across all sectors. Instead: Schools at capacity. Hospitals oversubscribed. Homelessness at record highs. Housing supply constrained while prices hit all-time highs. Rents at historic highs. Certain crime categories rising sharply. Spending money in certain areas with zero foundations or care for future issues it may cause. Leadership is about delivery, not press conferences. Policy is about outcomes, not optics. Some politicians seem more focused on headline-grabbing distractions, whether it is banning drone deliveries or swapping flags in their bios, than delivering measurable change. Too many specialise in sound bites and deflection, not outcomes. Ireland is an incredible country. A place I love. But at the government level, we are drifting. We need to do better. The question is why we aren’t. Why do we go to the polls time and time again and nothing changes. Can anything change? Do we even have the right parties and people at the front to make any real difference?