EU leaders ‘were slow to act on crisis’

European Union leaders did not react “anything like as fast as they needed to” during the euro crisis, “just doing enough to solve today’s problem but not the problems of tomorrow”, according to a former leader of Fine Gael.

Alan Dukes pointed out at a conference on Europe that the euro crisis started to materialise in 2007 but it took another five years of crisis before the first policy action was taken by the EU.

The ECB and in particular president Mario Draghi were singled out for praise by Mr Dukes and Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, with Mr Dukes saying “the ECB has done the most to counter the crisis despite treaty restrictions”.