Aideen Hayden (Labour)

I welcome the Minister for Finance to the House. It is a great pleasure to have him here with us and I hope we will see more of him again in the future.

Like other Members, I have no difficulty with this technical Bill. We should all express our heartfelt sorrow to the Greek people as we are only well aware of the pain they are going through. However, it is a wider issue.

Reading the excellent documentation on this legislation furnished to us by the Oireachtas Library and wider commentary, there is no doubt this bailout package is a bitter pill for the Greek people. I note much of the commentary is quite derogatory of the Greeks, littered with statements such as the Greeks cannot be trusted, they have been fooling us for years, they are spending other people's money funding an unsustainable economy and have a significant black market. The bailout package does not even give them control over the funds. Instead, they will be placed into a separate account so they do not even get to touch it.

As the Minister said, Ireland is not Greece. Our political leaders understandably point out that Ireland has a vibrant export-led economy very unlike the Greek economy. However, it remains that both our wider difficulties relate to the eurozone. The most recent EUROSTAT figures and statements by the EU Commissioner, Olli Rehn, make it clear that Europe is in recession. There is a link between that recession and our failure to deal with the euro crisis. Not to put too fine a point on it but Europe has failed miserably to support the euro. There have been repeated failures and, on every single occasion, Europe has been brought kicking and screaming to the table. I am reminded of similar political failures going back several years to the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. I do not need to remind Senators about the atrocities that took place in Srebrenica and elsewhere. There can be a high cost to failure.

The IMF has recently put it up to EU leaders that its contribution to the Greek bailout package will depend on European leaders putting up a decent firewall. The IMF will only decide its contribution after the second week of March at the next EU summit. This crisis is far from over.

As I stated earlier, there is a certain amount of moralising about the Greek position. Other people's failings seem not to get mentioned such as the French penchant for protecting its own industries or the Italian micro-economy that is largely untaxed. The bottom line is Ireland should be less willing to distance itself from Greece. Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal are peripheral nations in Europe. In the 1980s and 1990s, that element enabled us to build a useful alliance with these countries around the restructuring of EU funds away from the Common Agricultural Policy and towards Structural Funds and the Social Development Fund. We benefited significantly from that change in policy. We should consider a new sort of entente with our peripheral neighbours for a more formal strategic alliance to re-establish some balance between the interests of the periphery and the centre. After all, one of the premises of the EU is balanced regional growth.

Will this bailout be enough? From what I have read, the chances are it probably will not be. The chances in fact are that Greece will be voluntarily forced out of the EU. The reality remains, however, that this is the best package. To be honest, Ireland is hoping to benefit from this Greek tragedy. We cannot refer to it specifically due to media commentary in recent days but it is an opportunity for us to renegotiate our own position.

I will conclude by citing the Zarnowitz rule, which Senator Barrett knows, that deep recessions are typically followed by steep recoveries. On International Women's Day, we should conclude this debate with that thought.