Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-03-10-Speech-4-014-000"
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"en.20110310.3.4-014-000"2
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"Mr President, Ireland is a tragic historical lesson for us. At first, this country was always celebrated as the ‘showcase’ country and the model for new members of the Union, although at that time, very wrong policies were permitted and encouraged and these resulted in enormous bubbles in the property sector having to be dealt with, the banking sector being allowed to become a law unto itself and no attention being paid to preventing competitive dumping in the area of taxation.
Commissioner, you have the same nationality as me. We know how many Austrian writers, for example, suddenly discovered that they are Irish, because they had to pay hardly any tax there. What did the supposedly extremely pro-European forces do at that time? Absolutely nothing! They said ‘this country is a wonderful example’.
All of that has now completely collapsed. This bubble has now turned out to be exactly what many people said it was all along. Once again we have a situation where – and I am not alone in thinking this – anti-European sentiment is being fanned by the fact that we are again allowing the wrong policies to be pursued, in this case by imposing this massive package on Ireland. Commissioner, you say that the Member State is committing itself to this. However, we know from our experience of World Bank and International Monetary Fund programmes – and what we are currently seeing in Ireland is not so very different from this – that in the end, these countries have no choice.
If we were to take a step back and say ‘it is a shame that Ireland did not reject the Treaty of Lisbon the second time around’, then we could come to a completely different way of thinking. We would then see that, with this European construct, we are dealing with something that could be likened to a vehicle, the front of which consists of a Porsche while the back consists of a bicycle. These two things do not go together. They need to be much stronger.
If we want to prevent this Europe from breaking apart, we actually need something like a Constitution for Europe. We then need clear benchmarks that actually apply to everyone. We need economic governance. This fragmentary approach – forwards, backwards, sidewards – will not work, and in the end, Commissioner, it is more likely to end in disaster than in what you, I and the vast majority of this House are working for, namely, a peaceful, functional and also united Europe."@en1
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