barryqwalsh
Gold Member
- Sep 30, 2014
- 3,397
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For a long time we were officially “not Britain”. Now we are officially “not Greece”. We are a “northern European country” – Greece is “down there”, like the naughty bits we don’t like to talk about. But after Sunday, we may have to talk about them after all.
In the euro zone story, Ireland has projected itself, not just as not Greece but as the anti-Greece. Greece is trouble; Ireland is well-behaved. There is some logic to this position — the Greeks went into the crisis with a much worse underlying economy than the Irish did — but there’s also an unspoken element of ethnic stereotyping. Ireland (in a delicious historical irony) wishes to be thought of as coolly Anglo-Saxon, not hot-blooded Mediterranean.
Hypocrisy
And there’s also a deep hypocrisy at work. In practice, Ireland has let the Greeks do the protesting and then nipped in afterwards to claim whatever concessions their “irresponsible” bolshiness has won. Thus, for example, in 2011, the Greeks insisted that they couldn’t and wouldn’t pay the punitive 6 per cent interest rates on EU bailout loans. They got those rates reduced to 3.5 per cent and the term for repayment doubled to 15 years. Ireland got the same benefits – even while it maintained its distance from the Greek awkward squad.
Fintan O Toole Syriza s way or Frankfurt s way There s only one answer for Ireland
In the euro zone story, Ireland has projected itself, not just as not Greece but as the anti-Greece. Greece is trouble; Ireland is well-behaved. There is some logic to this position — the Greeks went into the crisis with a much worse underlying economy than the Irish did — but there’s also an unspoken element of ethnic stereotyping. Ireland (in a delicious historical irony) wishes to be thought of as coolly Anglo-Saxon, not hot-blooded Mediterranean.
Hypocrisy
And there’s also a deep hypocrisy at work. In practice, Ireland has let the Greeks do the protesting and then nipped in afterwards to claim whatever concessions their “irresponsible” bolshiness has won. Thus, for example, in 2011, the Greeks insisted that they couldn’t and wouldn’t pay the punitive 6 per cent interest rates on EU bailout loans. They got those rates reduced to 3.5 per cent and the term for repayment doubled to 15 years. Ireland got the same benefits – even while it maintained its distance from the Greek awkward squad.
Fintan O Toole Syriza s way or Frankfurt s way There s only one answer for Ireland