The Spectator’s Notes | 20 November 2010

Who said that the Germans ‘pay half of the countries [in the European Union].

Who said that the Germans ‘pay half of the countries [in the European Union]. Ireland gets 6 per cent of their gross domestic product this way. When is Ireland going to stand up to the Germans?’ It was Nicholas Ridley in his infamous interview with Dominic Lawson in this paper just over 20 years ago. Now he has got his answer, sort of. Ireland is trying to stand up to the Germans, and probably failing. If you strip out the unwarranted anti-German sentiment in Ridley’s interview and concentrate on his analysis, he has been proved right. Germany did, as he feared, set up the single currency in a way which ensured its dominance of the European continent. It did bring about a world in which, for members of the euro, the German Chancellor tries, as Ridley put it, ‘to lay down what we should do on the banking front and what our taxes should be’. Luckily, that ‘we’ does not include Britain, because it stayed out of the euro. But Chancellor Merkel is now trying to give Dublin exactly such orders about banking and taxes as Ridley foretold. The Ridley thesis was that if such a thing happened in Britain, ‘there would be a bloody revolution’. Will there be one in the eurozone?

‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’ goes the old Sinn Fein slogan. As the Republic suffers financial collapse, could it apply the other way round? The logic of the situation is that Ireland would be a very cheap ‘nation once again’, and we British could go and buy up large amounts of it. But logic is impeded by the partial cause of this smash, Ireland’s membership of the euro.