Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

By every analysis, capital controls have been identified as a first formal step towards a Greek exit from the eurozone and a signal of a dramatic escalation of the crisis. In this, the Minister was the principal supporter of Mr. Schäuble, the German Minister for Finance.  Mr. Schäuble’s position is a clear one, and it is more extreme than that of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.  He is against concessions to Greece and indifferent towards its place in the euro, and he is one of those who took a damaging position towards Ireland’s interests in the past. That our Government would side with him against Greece is a disgrace. At the very moment that the Greek Government was finally tabling significant measures to bridge the gap with international lenders, our Government decided to support a ratcheting up of the crisis. What is even worse is that our Government sided with a small minority of hardline states whose position was decisively rejected by the meeting.

The ECB is no soft touch in the Greek negotiations.  It has an extremely poor and at times disastrous policy record relating to individual support programmes for countries. Yet even the ECB rejected the extreme position which the Minister, Deputy Noonan, took on behalf of Ireland yesterday. Obviously the Taoiseach has been very grateful to the Chancellor for helping him during our last election, and he has refused to ever challenge the German Government’s policies, but this marks a move to a far more craven and unacceptable phase. No doubt the Minister will come up with some homespun way of trying to claim that he was actually doing the opposite of what the record shows. This is an act which is no longer fooling anyone but the most gullible. The Taoiseach has a duty to explain the Minister's behaviour yesterday and to explain why, at such a sensitive moment, his Government supported an escalation of the crisis at the very time when a breakthrough had become possible.

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