EU budget oversight - No shame in protective measures

THE European Commission, the executive arm of the 27 countries of the EU, has proposed regulations that would allow it to review the draft budgets of eurozone countries in order to ensure the proposed national budgets would be inline with EU budgetary rules.

This inevitably raises questions about infringing on national sovereignty. In reality, this country has already signed away its fiscal sovereignty.

The overall aim now should be to regain that sovereignty and to ensure that when we do, the measures are in place to curb the kind of reckless spending that led to the current debacle. We should welcome some overall EU control of fiscal spending as a means of guarding against similar irresponsible behaviour by any future government.

Such checks and balances would be a positive development, even though the eurosceptics would probably complain that we were signing away our overall sovereignty. It would be the reverse.

We would be guarding against a repetition of what has happened here or elsewhere within the EU. This is about having checks and balances to prevent other countries like Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain endangering the whole EU with reckless spending.

Ireland is only a tiny part of the EU, so protecting the integrity of the whole EU and ensuring that other individual countries do not topple the whole process is in our vital interest.