And Some Will Still Say that I am anti-EU

I have read economist Brendan Lynch's piece in Friday's "The Irish Times" carefully, and yet cannot find a single sentence with which I disagree.

The crucial passage is this one

The Government would be foolish if it did not remind voters that we would never have achieved our current level of living standards without EMU participation thanks to low interest rates, having a world currency and the additional IFSC projects that EMU participation helped bring to Ireland. Having to play by the EMU rules is an acceptable long term price to pay for EMU’s economic benefits

The writer might have added that membership of the single currency area attracted more than just IFSC projects. If he were more politically-minded, he might also have mentioned the huge gains in convenience for Irish tourists visiting other Euro-zone countries.

Note, however, that I remain concerned by the robustness of the arrangements for the Euro. The Stability Pact is not the only one of its foundation pillars that is looking shaky: President Sarkozy, nothing daunted by the fact that the head of the ECB is French, wants the ECB to be more responsive to political concerns.

As an a priori issue, one can hold divergent views on how independent a central bank should be - I myself have become more enamoured of independence as years have passed, from which phrasing an obvious conclusion may be drawn - and there is a good argument for making the ECB's mandate less ascetically monetarily pure. But a French-inspired move to a "political" ECB would quickly lead to disaster. Ironically, it would be a political disaster in the first instance: the German electorate would finally lose all patience, and the Czechs would not be the only ones to follow.