CITY AND SUBURBAN
There's a Celtic tiger on our doorstep and we have to pay to feed it
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
ere it is, on our doorstep: Europe's own Celtic tiger. All it needs now is a Dr O'Mahathir. This is Ireland, whose econo- my will grow this year by 8 per cent — the sort of growth that countries like Malaysia used to expect before it all went wrong, and more than twice our own rate, which the Treasury and the Bank of England think that we cannot sustain. This figure is no bubble on a pint of Guinness but a sober calculation by Kevin Gardiner of Morgan Stanley. It just shows how an economy can flourish when the biggest contribution is the monthly cheque from Brussels. Net transfers from the European Union, as Mr Gardiner soberly puts it, account for 3 per cent of the Irish economy. Five years ago they accounted for 5 per cent, but do not imagine that the cheque has shrunk since — the economy has compounded. You might ask why a country with this sort of growth rate needs and gets such a colossal subsidy from Brussels, or rather from coun- tries like ours, which subscribe to it. Easy, really. Ireland, like Greece and Portugal, is on the payroll vote. The Commission's pocket boroughs are sure to support almost any Euro-proposition so long as the month- ly cheque comes with it. So they were lined up to blackball Britain for the new Euro-X economic club, much to Tony Blair's and Gordon Brown's chagrin. These two should be asking themselves what is in it for us. Why should we subsidise Ireland and get neither thanks nor credit, nor leverage when, as now and so often, we need some? Next month they should sit on the cheque and pretend that it has been held up in the Holyhead post office. They might even save Ireland from the tigers' fate.
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