The Irish love affair with Europe still brings a tear to the eye. But let's not kid ourselves. This is a relationship based on money. Ask anyone involved with the Irish presidency which, thank heavens, took over the show from the temperamental Italians on 1st July.
Two summits and half a dozen ministerials over the next six months will do wonders for the tourist business. The Brussels bureaucrats and hacks will kick up a stink about third world telephone lines and second-rate cuisine, but they are a cut above the Hollywood stars who have taken over the country seats. And they are a safer bet than all those braying public schoolboys from the home counties who have chosen Dublin as the cool place to hold a weekend stag party.
Money is not the only reason why the Irish consider themselves good Europeans, but it is an important one. Last year, le peuple irlandais pocketed a net ?1.4 billion from the EU budget. Per head, that is more than any other country in the union, including the greedy Greeks. Thanks to regional aid from Brussels, the Irish are building better roads, better railways, and better golf courses.
But here's the paradox. The way the Irish tell it-and they tell it well-their country is a cross between a Celtic tiger and a leprechaun on steroids. A growth rate three to four times the pace of France and Germany; a 4 per cent increase in employment over the past ten years; and a currency which has appreciated 4 per cent against sterling this year alone. So why does Ireland insist on being treated on a par with the Club Med countries: poor, helpless and deserving of large annual bribes known as EU "cohesion funds"?
The answer is that the Irish in Europe are brash extroverts suffering from an inferiority complex. After 23 years of membership of the EU, they still cannot quite believe that they have made it.
Take Padraig Flynn, Ireland's commissioner in charge of social policy in Brussels. When Flynn and his wife arrived in town in late 1992, one veteran diplomat remarked that the couple looked and talked as if they had just stepped out of a peat bog.
The same diplomat does not talk like that now. Commissioner Flynn loves to go on, and on, and on, but he is a popular chap with three times the street-smarts of Sir Leon Brittan. In the beef war, when "Sirloin" lost his cool a couple of times, Flynn came to the rescue inside a hostile European commission.
Now it is true that Flynn's loyalties inclined more toward Irish heifers than the future of the British government. But when it came to bull semen exports, the Irish commissioner sent all the balls into the opponent's court. He played peace-maker when most of his colleagues just wanted to walk away.
u u u
strange as it may seem, the Irish look set to stage a similar rescue operation during their presidency. Despite pressure from the Germans and the Benelux countries, the Dublin government shows little interest in ambushing the British government during their stage of the Maastricht treaty review conference (IGC)-either at the French-inspired mini summit in mid-October or the full summit in December when a draft on Maastricht 2 is supposed to be ready.
The easy explanation is that prime minister John Bruton does not want to make any move which could jeopardise the peace talks in Northern Ireland. But life is more complicated in Europe: Bruton understands that there is no sense in cornering a Tory government ahead of the British general election. He has no intention of handing John Major an anti-Europe weapon around the time of the Conservative party conference at the beginning of October. Best wait for Tony Blair to produce a more reasonable British bargaining position-even if it means waiting until autumn 1997 to wrap up the IGC.
u u u
the other reason for keeping the British on side is monetary union. Ireland currently meets the Maastricht criteria for the single currency, but it is hesitant about joining a single currency without Britain.
Maurice O'Connell, the laconic governor of the Irish central bank, reckons that 50,000 jobs, mainly in the food processing and textile industry, could be lost if Britain devalued and Ireland had to hold its exchange rate firm inside the single currency area. But he still insists that it is safer for Ireland to join than to stay out because foreign investment-the key to curing Ireland's chronic unemployment-might dry up. Ruairi Quinn, the Irish finance minister, agrees.
Quinn, who looks as if he has stepped out of the front row of a rugby scrummage, can demolish most opponents. He is a socialist who talks like a continental Christian democrat. Words such as "stability culture" trip off his tongue. He is living proof that monetary union has become an article of faith for the Irish. It is the means of breaking with an unhappy colonial past. Yes, the Irish still believe in miracles.
