Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)

Will the Minister of State consider an analysis in last week's edition of The Guardian which put forward the notion that many of today's problems have come from an unwillingness to re-finance Greece, Ireland and Portugal in the early days? Their share of the euro area public debt to GDP ratio is ridiculously low and cancelling out their debt would have been less painful than the present arrangement. The crisis arose because markets and rating agencies saw the stupidity of European leaders who were ineffective when it came to rescuing indebted countries and who introduced self-defeating austerity programmes. Fear produced a ballooning of the interest rate spread and thus the problems have dramatically got out of control because of poor decision-making by the Europeans in the first place.

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