"IN psychological terms, this was a very important summit and I think that we will now have a treaty in Amsterdam. Dublin has moved things along and that is as much as you could have asked for," Mr Romano Prodi, the Italian Prime Minister, commented.
The Dublin summit certainly did as much as Italy could have asked for. At the very moment that his government's harsh budgetary policies have been coming under unremitting pressure from sources such as the Confindustria president, Mr Giorgio Fossa, and the Fiat managing director, Mr Cesare Romiti, the prime minister was certainly glad to have a brand new euro note to show for his belt-tightening efforts of this long, Italian autumn.
After all, Mr Prodi has probably put his political neck more on the line that any other European leader by stating that if "Italy does not make it into Europe" (code for make the single currency at the outset), then he will consider himself to have "failed politically" and will resign.
The Dublin summit has not, of course, made it certain that Italy will be in the EMU from the outset. That discussion is further down the road. What the Dublin summit has made clear, however, is that collective European Union worries about the traditionally volatile lira amount to far less than the messianic belief in the new currency - with Italy in it, sooner or later. Mr Prodi's satisfaction at the overall outcome was only too clear from his immediate assessment of Friday's stability pact agreement: "The deal was lair and sufficient for the future of European stability and growth. It's sufficient, it's rigid, it has a strict discipline, the flexibility is subject to a lot of conditions. It's not a compromise, it's an agreement.
"The market will like this agreement. I was really worried about the possibility of a delay. It was a difficult agreement, psychologically difficult. It was not a problem of technical levels. It was between one position of relaxed discipline and one of serious discipline and I think you had to move from the rigid position to a working deal ... and we did."
On a weekend when delegations were falling over themselves to think and sound positive, the experienced Finance Minister, Mr Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, a former governor of the Bank of Italy, shrugged off pessimistic predictions about either the socio-economic cost of the euro or about the Italian economy's ability to observe the long-term fiscal discipline implicit in the basic ground rules of the new single currency:
"I don't see why European integration should be seen as the cause of recession. European unity is the sine qua non creation of a structure which can take Europe and Europeans down the road to winning the economic and commercial confrontation with Japan `and the USA."
Senior members of Italy's experienced team of Eurocrats confirmed the positive Prodi-Ciampi line, with one Foreign Office source suggesting that Italy was more than satisfied with the summit.