Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

Well, not just interest rates, Senator, and ... like there ... you see the structure of the euro is very, very unique in that you don't have a central government, you don't have a central fiscal authority. We used to have the broad economic policy guidelines which are, kind of, recommendations in a, kind of, a way. I know things will be slightly changed now in the last two years or so. You don't ... so, therefore, you don't have what you'd have in a normal, say, country like Ireland, the United Kingdom, America, Germany, whatever, where all those things are melded together. So, therefore, you have a currency; you have the individual member states running their own economic policies; you have various differences between cultures and everything else; and, yet, you're supposed to run a single currency.

Now, before we set up the euro ... for example, there were five criteria that countries or member states were supposed to meet before they joined. One was inflation; one was the 3% debt - the 3% debt every year; one was the total debt ratio which meant that every country was supposed to have a debt-to-GDP ratio of less than 60%. There were two others as well about that you had to ... your currency was supposed to have stayed within a band, I think, not greater than 2.25% of the central ... and I forget the last one. Incidentally, Ireland was one of the few countries to meet all of those criteria. Sorry, inflation was the last one. In the inflation one ... that you weren't supposed to be, I think, more than 2%, or less than 2%, outside the average of the three lowest countries and, actually, Ireland was one of the three lowest countries. Ireland had a debt ratio less than 60%.

Now, some countries that were allowed to join the euro, like a founding member state of the European Union like Italy, had a debt ratio of 100% where all ... the country where all the struck ... all the bodies are, Belgium, has a debt ratio of over 100 % as well, so that was a long way from 60%, but, lo and behold, mirabile dictu, the 60% absolute rule that the German Government had insisted upon in negotiations then came to be interpreted as "approaching 60%". So, therefore, the Italian Government was approaching 60% because I think the ratio came from 114% one year to 110% and the Belgian Government did something similar.