Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I think we will wait for the results of the German election, in truth. Would the witnesses say, as I characterised when I introduced this issue, that we are in a sense still an Atlantic-oriented economy with regard to those inflows that Mr. Coffey spoke of? In the general influences on our very open trading economy we are very much in that space rather than a Continent-oriented economy. The economy is not tied in that respect. We have signals, and I think they are useful, but I do not see any measurement for how close we are. I remember at the height of the crisis someone said to me that if only Ireland had tucked in behind the German economy and kept our inflation below theirs, we could not have gone wrong because we would have been constantly competitive within the eurozone. Is that the case now? Are we tucked into the eurozone area or are we still out there in the Atlantic with two nutters - economic nationalists - either side? Are we exposed in that sense as they come to reset the fiscal compact rules?