A piece by John Waters in today’s Irish Times seems to claim that Ireland’s acceptance of the Maastricht treaty, which gave us Euro entry along with low interest rates and which tied our economy to those of Germany and France, is the root cause of the fiscal and monetary problems we suffer from at present.
This is a nonsensical, disingenuous argument. France still enjoys triple A ratings on its government debt and Germany has one of the strongest economies on the planet. For a while Ireland, too, had money to burn. Unfortunately, burn it we did.
John is right, though, when he talks of collective amnesia. If we didn’t suffer from it we would remember that, at the time of Euro entry, each country joining had to convince the EU that it had its finances in proper order, by having national debt and budget deficits within set boundaries. It is reasonable to presume that they were meant to stay that way. That the common currency meant we no longer had the ability to devalue our way out of high inflation is not new news. It was drilled into us, over and over again at the time, that this was going to be the case.
It seems central Europe took it for granted, or was convinced by our negotiators, that the Irish government, its Finance department and their economic advisors understood these fundamental economic principles. But it appears they did not.
What happened in practice was that the good old Republic of Ireland went ahead and took advantage of all the nice things that Euro entry had to offer, such as significant trade benefits, defense against speculative attack on our currency, very low mortgage rates (which we abused), elimination of currency exchange costs and risk for travelers to the rest of the Eurozone, pricing transparency for same, an additional incentive for US foreign direct investment into Ireland - and ignored the responsibilities it brought, the most important of which was to control our inflation.
To illustrate the point, imagine what it might be like if a group of eighteen year old boy racers were given control of a souped up sports car, for example a Masarati or a Ferrari, after having convinced the provider that they were actually mature, fully trained, experienced professional drivers.
The sports car in this analogy is the highly tuned European economy that German (and Dutch, and Nordic) prudence and efficiency had nourished over the years since the last war, and which was well known to be predicated on the control of inflation so that it is positive (deflation is also bad) but low.
The supplier is the European Union and you can work out for yourself who the boy racers are.
We broke every rule in the book. 120% mortgages, lending for everything from property development to foreign homes to whatever you’re having yourself. Spending went completely out of control. State capital projects routinely came in so far over budget that the numbers were shocking. We had a banking compliance system that became a global joke. We had a government that bought its way through successive elections without any regard for, and it seems now, no understanding of what an inflation differential between us and central Europe would eventually lead to.
All is not lost, however. We do seem to have woken up and, as everything is relative, we actually now start to look good by comparison to the most errant Euro member, Greece. With a bit of luck this present crisis will allow us to learn by bitter experience.
With a bit more luck we will be allowed to stay in the Euro, despite our demonstration of an embarrassing immaturity when it comes to the most basic economic principles.
And by the way - entering into a mutually beneficial multinational, legally binding agreement, that the other parties expect your country to adhere to, does not constitute loss of national sovereignty, no matter what the venerable Olivia O'Leary says, as quoted in John Waters’s article.
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