Greek exit could blow the euro edifice apart

The challenge for Ireland to emerge from the very deep hole in which it has found itself since 2007 was always going to be extremely difficult.

The big hope was that a relatively strong external recovery would help lift the export sector and this in turn would eventually feed through to employment creation and domestic demand.

Unfortunately, anything that could go wrong in our most important export markets — particularly the EU market — has gone wrong. Earlier this week, there was a sense of relief in some quarters that the eurozone economy avoided going into technical recession in the first quarter of this year.