Under the helm of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, critical deficits have opened across almost all sectors from transport to housing, water, energy infrastructure, healthcare and our digital systems. Successive Governments have allowed dangerous gaps to open between the Ireland this Government claims we are and our critical infrastructure that we just cannot rely on. Under Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the remaining Independents who support them, critical deficits are far from being the exception. They are visible, they are the norm and, increasingly, they are putting ordinary people and their health at risk. Successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments have produced critical infrastructure, much of it designed and constructed decades ago, that has totally failed to keep pace with Ireland's growth and has, to date, squandered most of its potential. The reality is that we are asking systems that were built for a smaller, slower, less complex Ireland to carry too heavy a load. Those systems are already buckling under the pressure and they are starting to fail. I will take transport as an example. Congestion is not a rush-hour issue; it is the result of structural failures of this Government, no matter what part of the transport network you examine. Roads are in a state of disrepair. They are over capacity and not safe. Rail networks are operating at the absolute limits of what ageing signalling and rolling stock can handle. Commuters are regularly packed like sardines on platforms as they wait for overcrowded trains that cannot be relied on to turn up on time. Public transport projects, where they exist, have often been delivered late and over budget, or else scaled back to get them across the line. For many parts of rural Ireland, public transport is totally non-existent. The result is lost time, lost productivity and a daily tax on people's lives, especially those who have no alternative but to commute for long distances because housing is unaffordable near to where the jobs are. This brings me to housing, which in itself is a form of critical infrastructure. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have treated housing as a market problem for far too long, rather than as the right it should be. The fundamental difference between the attitude of the Government and our attitude to housing is that the Government feels it must incentivise large developers to have very expensive, for-rent apartments on the quays in Dublin whereas we believe more social and affordable housing is required. What we need, and what people need, is a home they can call their own. It is quite simple. When people cannot live near schools, work or transport, every other system is strained: water networks, roads and emergency services all absorb the cost of that failure. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the electricity grid or in water and wastewater infrastructure. Capacity on the electricity grid has been gobbled up by data centres, leading to a ticking time bomb. Our ageing pipes leak vast quantities of treated water every day. They are operating far beyond capacity. All around County Kerry, villages like Castlegregory, Fenit, Duagh and Ballyduff - I could go on - have, in effect, what is called an Imhoff tank, which is basically a hole in the ground that has probably been there for 60 years. In all of these villages, you cannot now have infrastructure or housing built because of the age of this infrastructure, if you could call it that. Development cannot take place and communities cannot grow. In an era where one-off housing in rural areas, particularly under significant urban influence, is more difficult than ever to achieve, people cannot move into towns and villages and they cannot develop because the necessary investment in the infrastructure has not been made by this Government. I am running out of time. If we do not get this right, things could deteriorate even further and that is something Ireland cannot afford.

Sentiment score: -0.13