Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Maybe, but I do not think that is a solution.

Since the "Mercozy" creation, the Union has not been run in the way it used to be in the time of Jacques Delors and Roy Jenkins. The arrival of the French President Mr. Hollande has not changed that very much. That raises many questions and many people are concerned about whether the Union is becoming one for corporates rather than for people. None of that undermines anything that Deputy Barry has said about how Ireland was transformed by membership of the Union. However, that is an enormous question confronting us now.

On the flaws in the euro, we did not have bank resolution and we did not have supervision of the banks in the way we should have. We now have this. What other flaws do the witnesses see that can be rectified? Deputy Boyd Barrett asked a fair question: name any school of economics that believes that debt sustainability is the outcome in Greece. It is difficult to find any school of economics or credible economist who thinks that. The reason behind what Mr. Varoufakis alleges in his piece with regard to Spain, Portugal, Ireland, etc., is that those countries made a pragmatic assessment of what was feasible and cut their cloth to measure. The write-down was not going to happen in these discussions at the weekend. If that meant "Grexit", that meant "Grexit" as far as the German mindset was concerned.

Here we have this noble project that has achieved so much, but the practical politics of it at the moment is that, whether it is in the Bundestag or in the ECB, the German mindset is dominant. We politicians can rail against it all we like and economists can point out what the witnesses have pointed out here today, but what was likely to come out of last weekend's summit that would have addressed this situation in a way that was likely to lead Greece back to market access?