Exactly the same as every other country that signed up to the Stability and Growth Pact.

That's rather disengenuous. Brussels and Germany knew very well that Greece cooked the books to get in. Yet they still admitted them into the Eurozone. Such is their desperation to fulfill their Euro Dream.

Greece isn't an innocent party there either. If Brussels and Germany knew they cooked the books then certainly Athens knew too.

So Ireland has to abide by rules it helped to draw up. Democracy at its best.

Ireland's doing great, apart from: unemployment hit 15%, 300,000 left the country to find work, wages have fallen, taxes have risen, benefits cut, public services, including the health service, slashed, there's a housing crisis as bad that in the UK, and it will take them 40 years of paying taxes to pay off all their liabilities, which includes those who lent money to Ireland's banks, the EU ordering them to pay that in full. Compelling evidence has been provided by whistleblowers that banks operating in Ireland were involved in criminal activity that contributed to the banking crash, no police investigation has started.

Some success!

"The lesson of history is that we don't learn from history." Warren Buffet.

Again, disengenuous. And excusing the fact that they were let in.

They shouldn't have been let in, but they're not innocent in that situation either.

I never said they were, but the final power rests with Brussels and Germany. They could have stopped them, but the folly of their Euro dream was all they cared about.

But they don't set their own interest rates. The Bank of Ireland was, prior to the euro, raising rates to slow the property boom, but when Ireland joined the euro rates halved, the then Bank Governor warning that there could be a problematic property bubble, and how right he was.

They can't engage in Keynsian boosts to their economy, as that takes government deficit over the euro limit. And if they really get on the wrong side of Germany and the ECB, they'll be given orders on what amount pensions should be, what the minimum wage will be, etc, as has happened to Greece.

I did say 'on the road to recovery', which would suggest the country has been through a prolonged bad period (much worse than anything that happened to the UK during the same period). It was a banking and property crisis that caused the entire economy to crash, what you're describing was front page headlines in Ireland for several years. But it's quite incorrect to say that no bankers have been jailed, several top Irish bankers are already behind bars with more cases to come :

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/f...raud-1.2738637

Back in the nineties, those of us who pointed out that centralised control of government budgets was an inevitable consequence of a single currency, were told, in no uncertain terms, that we were scaremongering.

Exactly. It amazes me that Irish citizens can be so comfortable with Euro membership. I thought they are a proud and patriotic country?

Nobody forced bankers at Deutsche, Commerzbank, BNP Paribas and Societe Generale to lend Greece cash by buying it's short term bonds, even when the viability of Greek public debt was in serious doubt. (Google 'Greek debt', and you'll see what I mean). Nobody forced them to keep pocketing the vast bonuses they got while Greece was honouring its bonds. When it could no longer do so, and those banks demanded the EU pay them Greece's debts from public money, then chase Greece for it, nobody forced the EU to comply.
Nobody forced Goldman Sachs to accept a huge payment for fiddling the books of Greece, so they could keep borrowing for longer. Current ECB boss Mario Draghi was CEO of GS Europe at the time, and says he knew nothing of this. Well, nobody forces bankers to behave responsibly, and nobody ever forces them to face the consequences of their actions.

I expected better from you.

So what? Nobody's alleging that those people are oppressed. My post was in response to someone painting the Greeks as toiling under oppression from the EU, whereas in reality they have more control over their fate than Brexit supporters admit.

It would be incorrect to claim that Ireland's membership of the Euro caused the financial crash. The economy started dangerously overheating for a variety of reasons and the financial regulator was grossly negligent in not spotting what was happening inside the banks. The key thing about the crash is that virtually nobody saw it coming or deduced that the economy was about to go over the edge of a cliff. It's not as if the Irish government knew what was coming down the tracks but was hidebound by the rules of the Eurozone : the crisis happened in a matter of days.

Yet again that's disingenuous. Greece has less control over their own affairs then Ireland does if that's possible. They really have had to submit to German and ECB handholding.

That's what happens when a country needs a bailout.

Not true at all. The signs were there for a long time. Particularly in housing. Yet your government stupidly gave the tools to control it away by signing up to the Euro.

That's an example of democracy that North Korea or China would be proud of.

Or the IMF.

You're equating the IMF with North Korea or China? That's a new one. Lol.

Its going on 40 years since I drank in that pub. I drank many nice pints of Guinness and some not so nice in my 10 or so years living in Ireland, Mulligans has to be at the top of the list.

I remember a few old guys behind the bar in aprons, one of them just filling pints and leaving them on top of the taps to settle ..... they did great trade.

I think it was you who made that equation, or did you not know that the IMF has a role in the Greek bailout terms?

Need I point out how the recent changes on buy-to-let here have made such investments much less attractive than they were? These are expected to impact our domestic property market, so clearly setting our own interest rates is not the be all and end all of controlling property prices.

If the Bank Governor warned of a problematic property bubble then the Irish Government had the warning they needed to take action AND they had the taxation tools to alter investment in the property market. If they did not, they bear responsibility for their own inactions and its consequences.


The whole point of the "bailouts" was so that the countries effected could continue spending money that they wouldn't have been able to borrow in their absence. That is a Keynesian boost to their economies.

And clearly the countries concerned prefer to continue with the Euro rather than embrace the supposedly "better" alternative. That's obviously their democratic choice.