Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Apart from Mr. McCarthy’s view that Greece did not get the haircut it should have got in the first bailout programme, it is still not clear to me how the situation in Greece failed to resolve itself more successfully. My understanding is that before the Syriza Government came to power, Greece had returned to positive growth but is now back in negative growth. There was light at the end of the tunnel.

There has been a lot of talk about Germany’s role in this. At a conference I attended recently in Europe, I noted it was other small European countries which were unhappy about bailing out the Greeks, like the Baltic states. A commentator from Latvia said the per capitaincome there was half that of Greece. The owners of Greek debt now are other European countries. Some of them are not particularly happy to be taking any further hits when their people earn half as much as Greek citizens. It is unfortunate this debate focuses entirely on Germany and not the other European countries which stand to take the hit.

I am not surprised at the stand the UK’s media is taking on this. One of the issues around Brexit and euroscepticism is the fact that Europe has become too obsessed with the euro project. That is one of Britain’s dissatisfactions with its engagement in Europe. The idea the euro experiment is falling into some kind of disrepute is happy days for some of the UK media.

There is dissatisfaction with Germany. Is there an honest broker who could do a better deal like, for the sake of argument, Matteo Renzi, and might be able to pull some of the more disparate voices together around a table? There have been two failed bailouts in Greece.

It looked as if Greece was coming out of the tunnel before the election of Syriza. Europe has come some way in protecting the euro and eurozone member states from the circling sharks waiting to see the next blood in the water. We have had the stress tests and have put money in place to protect against the next run on the euro. Mr. McCarthy made the point in an interview on why the ECB pulled liquidity out of the Greek banks. My proposition is that €2 billion was taken out of Greek banks in a short period. This was a run on the euro without the Greek Central Bank imposing, or indicating it was even willing to impose any capital controls. That surely made sense.