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

It is important to counter the fact of our terrible difficulty with the fact that the even greater difficulty which some thought likely has not happened.

I have three questions on that point. Professor Laffan spoke about the politics of constrained choice. Would we not be dealing with that anyway? Regardless of the nature of the eurozone, or what the EU will look like, globalisation is the game-changer. It changes everything. Alongside that are financial markets that will lend to countries in the future at the rate they think appropriate. The eurozone and the EU just offer a way for countries to get through that constrained choice more safely.

The idea that there is no choice, that no matter whom one votes for one gets the same thing, is detrimental to the development of politics. Should we not be engaging on the subject of what the planned and orderly exit of a country from the eurozone would involve? One of the big difficulties is how a country might leave the EU. It might be clear but nobody knows how a country would leave the eurozone, apart from the fact that it would probably be a disaster. If a country decides it does not want to be a part of this, how can it leave without bringing the entire structure down on everybody else?

What would development look like? Could we be heading towards an EU that will be extraordinarily fractured? Could we end up with a patchwork quilt of participation in the eurozone, in which various countries such as Britain decide to opt in and out of different arrangements, or would that be too unwieldy to manage? I know that the fiscal compact referred particularly to the eurozone, but Britain did have to participate in some of its consequences.