Phil Hogan

All bits and pieces coming out.

And I don't know if you remember, Neil, of course you do, probably, Phil Hogan was sacked in 1995. when he was part of the Fine Gael Labour and Democratic Left government, sacked for leaking things about the budget.

And here we have, every single day now, something being leaked.

And are the people going to be better off next Tuesday? I don't know.

When you say day, who are you referring to?

So it was actually Phil Hogan.

Yeah.

So Phoenix Gale.

And I came away from that meeting completely disillusioned.

And I went to the minister at the time, Phil Hogan, and I said, geez, this was the most demoralising, disillusioning meeting I ever went to.

And I said, because I said, I come from a sporting background.

And when I go into a dressing room and everyone is wearing a blue jersey, I know they're all playing with me.

But I said, I went into the meeting and I said, They all had different agendas.

None of them were, everyone were minding their own.

And Phil Hogan gave me a very good analogy.

And he says, I'll tell you, he says, what they are, he says, Pat, they're Gaelic fullbacks.

And we had responsibility for our own planning system, our own housing system, our own commercial rates, our own roads, our own sanitary services.

Over the years, various governments decided to whittle down the services that were available to local urban districts and gradually, in 2014, Mr. Phil Hogan Who's notorious, as far as I'm concerned, in his decision to basically abolish town councils completely and more or less put all the power back into the county councils.

And so what we're left with now is a much reduced council.

We have what's called a municipal district, which is eight members, but we're all members of Wicklow County Council.

Yes, absolutely.

And that is the complete opposite of that.

And at the time, Phil Hogan, it was a very populist kind of thing.

He said he was going to reduce the number of councillors by 50%.

European budget, and therefore there was predictions of a 20% and 30% cut in the cap budget seven years ago.

Phil Hogan, who was a commissioner at the time, worked hard to chase environmental money and manage to design schemes and top up money with that regard.

So there's a long way for this to go yet in terms of budget negotiations, but we're in a tricky spot because a lot of countries don't pay more to the overall EU budget.

There's a lot of demand to spend more.