With friends like the EU and the ECB, who needs enemies?

ONCE upon a time our political classes bowed to Rome. Now they do so to Brussels and Frankfurt.

The power and influence of the Vatican has been replaced by the European Commission and European Central Bank. Now it’s they who tell us what to do. The servility towards them is appalling and embarrassing. It may politic and it may be polite but the genuflection towards Jean Claude Trichet, the head of the ECB, recently has been embarrassing, although explained somewhat by the fact that he has the country caught in a vice-like financial grip.

And few are worse than the Irish who have profited by being part of the elite within the European system: they patronise us ungrateful malcontents for not knowing our place and for not appreciating how much we owe Europe. Any critique or criticism, no matter how well argued or factual, runs the danger of being labelled excessive in a cunning ploy to make the advocates seem like loonies.