Paying the price of union demands

When one joins a club and becomes a member one has to abide by the club’s rules and in some situations adjust one’s lifestyle to comply.

When Ireland joined the EU, our Government thought it had been given the keys to the EU cash vault and later on when they rushed in to accept the euro as the common currency among EU members, our Government failed to realise that unless we further adjusted our lifestyle and way of working we were heading for the disaster of being uncompetitive in the foreign markets.

The workers in each of the euro-using countries were being paid in the same currency but the hourly rates of pay differed widely from ours, and allowing that the workers of each country took the same number of man hours to produce an object or item, that item being produced by the country with the highest hourly rate would be the most expensive and least competitive on the market.