Creighton says EU envied around world

SEANAD:MINISTER FOR European Affairs Lucinda Creighton has said the EU needed to stop "self-flagellating" as it remained envied around the world. She told the Seanad yesterday that the setting up of the European project in the 1950s was a "monumental and fundamental moment in history" and that was still the case.

She said the Australian foreign minister and former prime minister Kevin Rudd had told her that Australia would like to aspire to “one 100th of the success” that the EU has had in a political and economic sense.

Speaking on a debate about last week’s European Council meeting, Ms Creighton confessed she was not “overjoyed” by the outcome of the meeting but it was a “little step in the right direction”.

She also said that saving the currency was the “plan A, B and C” of Government policy, and losing it would be an “economic disaster”.

Séan Barrett (Independent) said the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman predicted as far back as 2001 that the euro would not work. All his predictions had come true, especially that it would not protect small countries like Ireland from large capital inflows which destroyed the banking system.

Jim Walsh (Fianna Fáil) said he had lunch with the president of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe Petros Efthymiou last week.

He recalled Mr Efthymiou saying of German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy that “these people put themselves forward as leading us, but they don’t know where they are leading us. They don’t have solutions.”