Professor Alan Ahearne:

I think most counties did not, in the sense that once they joined the euro, that had implications for all other types of economic policy or how it had to react. This was because they had now lost control of their interest rate and exchange rate, two of the most powerful economic tools an economy has. Having lost control of those, everything else needed to adjust, but nothing adjusted. That was not just true in Ireland, but all across the euro area. I think governments had been exhausted by the effort to join the euro and from meeting the Maastricht treaty requirements and so on and had kind of relaxed. They seemed to believe that now that the euro was up and running, that was good, without recognising that now they had to be cognisant and very careful of other aspects of economic policy. They were not. They took the benefits, in Ireland and other peripheral euro countries, of the very low interest rates, which was good, but that also created risks and the risks were ignored.