Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for coming in to speak to us. I am sorry I missed the early part of Dr. Barrett’s presentation. I was at another meeting but I might get a copy of his comments afterwards.

While we have touched on the level of Europe’s crisis, with chronic unemployment and low levels of growth, it is worth acknowledging that what people thought was going to happen 12 or 18 months ago has not happened. Until last summer, reasonable people were predicting that Greece would be forced out of the eurozone and that would lead to an unravelling of the eurozone, which did not happen. People predicted that the European Central Bank would not play a greater role in keeping the euro together and dealing with our difficulties, which did happen. The spectre of mass sovereign defaults plunging the entire economic system into catastrophe did not materialise. Even though we are still dealing with profound crises for individual countries and the eurozone, many fears that were propagated during parts of this crisis have not materialised. We cannot say they are unlikely to materialise in a year’s time, but they are unlikely to materialise tomorrow. That is significant progress compared to our recent situation.

I was struck by Senator Reilly’s Frankenstein analogy, which I had heard before. It is accurate in two ways. Frankenstein’s monster was made of many different constituents, like the eurozone, and he came back from the dead. I cannot recall what happened to him in the end so I will leave the analogy there.