Oleary takes aim at quango irish water

Mullingar native and Gigginstown resident Michael O'Leary has weighed in on the Irish Water fiasco - and he's not a happy man.

The Ryanair boss launched a scathing attack on the Government while speaking at the Deloitte Enterprise Ireland CeoForum in Dublin Castle today, TheJournal.ie has reported.

“I don’t think the government gets what business needs – what business needs is less government, less bureaucracy and regulation,” he said.

"Yet all I’ve seen in the last five years is more bureaucracy, more quangos, more bloody regulation – all of which is invariably useless and self-defeating.

“We wasted a glorious crisis over the last five years – we haven’t restructured much of the public service and we have continued to push the can down the road.

"You have complete messes like the HSE and Irish Water where we think that just by establishing another quango and shovelling loads of bureaucrats into it we will have some improved services – we won’t.”

O'Leary also said that middle income earners were being taxed to the hilt while rich people were still being provided with state support.

Nevertheless, he sees great things ahead for an Ireland that puts small and medium enterprises first.

“The engine for growth will be small Irish companies not accepting that being big in Mullingar, Dublin or Ireland is enough," he remarked. "For success we have to be big in Europe and then in the world.”