Save the euro – beggar Ireland!

With the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB) coming to Ireland's rescue it's worth asking: with friends like this, who needs enemies?

The basic line is as follows: the Irish eejits have wrecked their economy and it threatens the entire eurozone. Ireland must be isolated and forced to accept a massively swingeing austerity package otherwise the entire euro project will come apart at the seams.

Put like that it seems a little unlikely, doesn't it? After all, how could a marginal economy on the fringes of Europe destroy the glorious single currency?

Having covered Ireland's decline for both the national press in Ireland and for the CS Monitor in the US, I am left wondering just how much gibberish can be spewed about the country. European politicians, particularly of the unloved and barely-elected Euro MP variety, as well as the media have lined-up to whinge about Ireland. Not that any of them know the first thing about the place.

Euro MPs have say that Ireland's "odious" tax policies must change. Odious as Ireland's taxation regime may be, what happened to national sovereignty? I seem to recall being told, when we were being frogmarched into agreeing to the Treaty of Lisbon, that the European Union had no intention of placing itself above member states' national parliaments. How times have changed.

The ignorance is galling. Spanish broadcaster TV3 referred to Ireland as part of "the United Kingdom" yesterday. With ignorance like this on display it's more than tempting to refuse to refer to the broadcaster as Catalan. Veteran British social democrat Polly Toynbee, a founder of the failed SDP political party, dedicated her Guardian column this week to berating Ireland and saying it shouldn't get a pennyfrom Britain due to its corporate tax policies. I hold no brief for the Irish government's tax policies (and personally consider them regressive and too heavily weighted onto earnings and VAT and not heavily enough on business) but Toynbee's glee is nauseating. Like the champagne pseudo-socialist she is, she can't wait to punish the plutocrats and fails to see that the top hat-wearing classes won't be hurt but the rest of us will (and her figures are dodgy, to boot). French web site Rue 89 shows the dangers of vox pops when it interviewed an Irish resident French national who claimed the recession had resulted in supermarkets introducing "meat locks". Minimal journalistic work would have turned up the fact that the "locks" (actually alarms, but hey…) were introduced over a year ago in areas with crime problems. Relationship to the recession? Impossible to say. If you like your reporting alarmist (pun intended) and context-free then Rue 89 is clearly the place to go. Der Spiegel, meanwhile, says “During Ireland’s boom years, thousands of people bought horses as a status symbol."

Enough! I think we've established that precious few people in Europe bothered to learn anything about Ireland before they started flapping their jaws.

But then there's the IMF…

As I wrote elsewhere, this organisation doesn't exactly have a sterling reputation for getting things right. Here are just a few of its greatest hits:

– While under IMF management, Argentinian unemployment exploded to 20 per cent and all bank accounts were frozen in 2002 due to a currency crisis.

– In March 2003 the IMF admitted its policies were hobbling developing world economies. “The process of capital account liberalisation appears to have been accompanied in some cases by increased vulnerability to crises,” the IMF stated in a report.

– In 1998 the IMF went into Brazil with a $41 billion (€30.39 billion) loan program intended to be a preventative measure. The result? Immediate capital flight of $20 billion (€14.71 billion).

– In 1996 the IMF approved stand-by credit for Venezuela. By 1998, interest rates had doubled to 68 percent.

– Then there was the kleptocracy that was Yeltsin’s Russia. The BBC dubbed Russia "the ‘IMF’s biggest failure."

These are the people who are going to save the eurozone?

Or could it be that the problem isn't just Ireland or its PIIGS friends of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain?

The assault on Ireland, as with Greece before it, is nothing other than a moralising myth.

Don't believe me? Well, there's probably not much that Green economist Richard Douthwaite and Daniel Ben-Ami, author of Ferraris for All agree on. Douthwaite essentially wants a steady state economy whereas Ben-Ami argues that growth is an imperative if we want to raise living standards. And yet, both say that blame lies not with the economies of Ireland or Greece and their supposedly feckless workers.

Douthwaite says Ireland "is a symptom not a cause" of economic problems within the eurozone. Ben-Ami, meanwhile, says that carping about Greece ignores the fact that there are serious underlying problems across Europe.

"The striking thing about Greece’s economic problems is that they are only a more extreme version of those facing not just other eurozone members but countries, such as Britain, outside the region," he says.

Beggaring Greece and Ireland won't save the euro. If the EU elites want to do that then they'll have to develop an actually productive economy.