Thursday 17 March 2011 | Site Feed | All feedsSign in or register--> By Daniel Hannan Politics Last up to date: November 18th, 2010 Comment on this Comment on this article Spot the main difference in between slaughtering civilians at Drogheda and offering preferential loans Irish officials in Brussels are reportedly calling it the “Oliver Cromwell Package“. That silly phrase partly reflects the atavism of a certain kind of Irish Europhile: anything that Britain does to Ireland – even offering it money – is part of a wicked plot. But it also reflects a justified concern about the loss of national independence. As the normally understated Irish Times put it in an editorial,
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And for what? The rescue package won’t tackle the underlying problem, namely that EU monetary policy will almost always be wrong for Ireland. At best, the bail-out will allow Ireland to limp along until the next time its cycle diverges from the Continent; at worst, it will worsen the Republic’s situation by removing one of the few advantages it still enjoys: competitive tax rates. Eurocrats have always resented what they call Ireland’s “harmful tax competition”. As they see it, successive Dublin administrations took EU subsidies and then recycled them into cuts in indirect and corporate taxes. As Nicolas Sarkozy put it, the Irish were a bunch of “cons“,
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Should Britain join the rescue package? Not if its purpose is to salvage the euro. We wouldn’t simply be wasting our money; we would be putting it to actively harmful use, trapping Ireland in her present discontents. There is a far better way in which we could help our neighbours, namely to offer them this practical alternative. Mark Reckless, whose grandfather was a Fianna Fáil TD, raised the idea in the House of Commons today. Our Irish cousins don’t have to choose concerning bankruptcy and subjugation: they could export their way back to growth.