Germany can’t make Germans out of us because of euro crisis

GERMANY is behaving like the euro is a pain in the ass to it, that it has received little or no reward for adopting it as its currency, that it wishes that it never gave up its Deutschmark as its own prized currency and that, now that it is stuck with the euro, it will be damned if it is going to have to pick up the tab for the fecklessness of other European nations (including us).

Germany seems determined to make Germans of us all when it comes to economic issues, as if it, and similar northern European states, has been a model of economic virtue over the last decade or so, while the rest of us were profligate wasters. But the truth is a bit more complex.

Well, let’s not forget that it was the Germans and the French who were the first to break the Maastricht rules on excessive government budget deficits. We in Ireland never did that until our banking crisis — largely funded by our banks borrowing from German and French banks who did not see our economy as a credit risk either — blew up our public finances. The Germans might have been annoyed with the way we were spending our money — the ambassador to Ireland in 2007 had quite a cut off at us about the level of public sector wages and the number of new cars we were buying — but they had little or nothing to say about the unsustainability of our tax base, dependent as it was on property and construction related revenues.