mr president we can see the way in which the irish republic has been brought to its present predicament by the euro
as early as two thousand and one irish economists were alarmingly warning that ireland desperately needed to raise interest rates to choke off the unsustainable boom
but of course there were no irish interest rates there was only the european central bank which by giving the core members what they needed was giving the peripheral members a double dose of what they did not need namely artificially cheap money
the problems of ireland are going to carry on for as long as it is in the single currency
the bailout may allow it to limp on until the next time that its monetary policy needs to diverge from those of the rest of the eurozone
it is crazy at a time like this when my own country already owes gbp eight hundred and fifty billion that we should be borrowing another gbp seven billion to send to ireland
that money will not only be useless it will be actively harmful because it will trap the republic of ireland in its present discontents
if we want to be helpful we could offer our friends and neighbours the far more immediate and practical assistance of allowing them a temporary currency union with sterling allowing them to treat their loans as being denominated in pounds and allowing them then to export their way back to growth
