Going to war may just take the edge off Sarkozy’s testosterone

ENDA KENNY could have a unique problem when he attends his second EU summit on Thursday and Friday — that of getting and keeping the attention of his fellow leaders sufficiently long to get his interestrate reduction.

He appeared to be the only source of entertainment for some at his previous summit just 10 days ago as truculent French President Nicolas Sarkozy baited him with threats to the country’s corporation tax.

Sarkozy was in an especially irritable mood and was heard to berate the EU’s foreign chief Catherine Ashton in the corridors outside the meeting for her opposition to enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya.

His success in appearing to lead the move against Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi when he hosted the meeting in Paris on Saturday and having French jets the first in the skies over the North African country should improve his humour for this week’s summit.

Kenny, for one, will no doubt be hoping that going to war will take the edge off Sarkozy’s testosterone and leave him feeling magnanimous towards Ireland and its woes.

Angela Merkel’s domestic pressures may or may not have a similar effect on her attitude towards questions of tax-rate increases and interest-rate reductions for Ireland.

Whether or not her party remains in power in the lander of Saxony-Anhalt after voters went to the polls yesterday will be decided over the next day or two. But next Sunday, within 48 hours of the summit ending, voters in Rhineland-Palatinate and the even more important Baden-Wuerttemberg region will ballot on her performance.

Should she lose the latter lander of 10.7 million people, which her party has governed for close to 60 years uninterrupted, her future will look bleak.

On her plus side is that she has succeeded in getting eurozone countries to sign up to a version of her and Sarkozy’s competitiveness pact which was designed to convince her domestic audience that Germany was not bailing out profligate countries without extracting a near-death price.

But no sooner has one question been answered but another arises. And this time it is Merkel’s reaction to the nuclear crisis in Japan and her decision to stay out of Libya. Her decision to order a halt to seven of Germany’s nuclear plants, having last year decided to reverse decisions to phase out nuclear and extend their life-span, is being seen as hypocritical.

And Germany’s decision not to support the French and British on imposing a no-fly zone over Libya at the UN is not finding favour with voters either.

Luxembourg’s prime minister Jean Claude Juncker expressed what many small countries must be feeling at a meeting in the European Parliament last week.

He said he did not like the link being made between the corporation tax issue and the Irish package.

“Some governments obviously find some pleasure in torturing Ireland inside and outside meetings. I don’t like these methods of dealing with problems,” he said.

Whether these bad-tempered leaders will continue to take out their irritation on Ireland won’t be obvious until Kenny is sitting around the table.

He will be hoping they will simply agree that the cut in the interest rate they agreed to at the last summit will now apply to Ireland.

If he is forced on the issue he no doubt will have a pocket full of carefully crafted commitments to discuss and even engage constructively with on tax issues.

He will be very careful not to make any promises that would bind the country into having its tax rates set by the EU. That is something that many — if not all — of his fellow EU leaders would see as a step too far.