Mr. Colm McCarthy:

-----he will have great fun tomorrow morning. The Deputy was right to raise the question about trust between member states. It is a type of confederal arrangement of 28 states, 19 of which are in the eurozone. Clearly, the sight of people on the Greek side running around accusing one another of blackmail and terrorism was not great. On the other hand, some senior European politicians, including Jean-Claude Juncker, announced a few weeks ago that all those guys who were complaining about the design flaws in the eurozone were an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy. There has been a great deal of loose talk on both sides.

To return to my earlier point, countries get into trouble because they are not being run very well. To go along to a financially distressed country and start complaining that it is not run as well as Denmark is silly. By definition, it is not very well run. Otherwise we would not be there. I have some familiarity with Greece. It does not have the breadth of a modern economy we have, nor does it have the public administration we have. The Greeks have intense problems with low level corruption, which is very common throughout the Balkans. It is the same in Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia, which are in the EU, and in several other countries such as Macedonia, Albania and so on. We get bothered because there are very occasional scandals here involving corruption in planning, fiddling around with zonings and all that. That is in the ha'penny place by comparison with what people take for granted in south-eastern Europe.

People do not have to pay speeding fines; they just slip $10 to the police officer. If one tried it here, one would be arrested. They do not pay taxes, but bribe tax officials. They do not pay customs duties, but do deals with the customs officers. One can buy examination results in universities and pay for better grades. One of the scandals in Greece is the waiting lists for the medical system. People can move up the waiting lists by bribing officials in the public hospitals. I am not denying that problems exist in Greece or that successive Greek Governments have been slow to address them. However, Greece is in a mess, and the purpose of a financial rescue programme, which should have been the case in 2010, is to fix it, not to kick it down the tracks.

In 2010, a large amount of money was loaned to Greece which it used to pay off the foolish lenders to previous Greek Governments who should have taken a hit upfront, not as a moral measure but as a practical one. This is how business people deal with financial no-hope cases. For example, if they are not getting their money back, they will take 50 cents in the dollar and move on. It is not business-like to pretend anything different. If one has loaned money to someone who is not going to repay it, one has lost the money. It is gone. One can put it into one's books today or in ten years' time. The act of putting it into the books is not the source of the loss. The source of the loss was the lending decision. Much of the extend-and-pretend that is happening is due to the fact that European governments do not want to tell their taxpayers they loaned their money to Greece, that it was a mistake and they should not have done it.

There is some spin going around that the Greeks have not bothered their barney over recent years making any effort to rectify their situation. It is not true. Speaking from memory, while the Greek budget deficit in 2010 was 15% of GDP, last year it was 3%. In circumstances in which the economy was collapsing, they knocked ten points off the deficit by increasing taxes and cutting public spending. The idea that the Greeks responded to the 2010 deal by lying on the beach drinking ouzo is incorrect. There have been shocking caricatures in the Greek newspapers of Germans as Nazis, and in the German newspapers of the Greeks as layabouts. I have no sympathy with either characterisation.