Ireland to rejoin Commonwealth – 43% of Sinn Fein wants GBP

Well it seems after signing their independence away, Ireland is now in talks to rejoin the Commonwealth. Over a third of Irish are even prepared to adopt the GBP as its currency to get out of the fixed rates of the Euro in an attempt to stabilise its economy.

Strangely, 43% of Sinn Fein supporters are spearheading the way for Ireland adopting the GBP as its currency.

Sinn Fein claims Ireland enjoyed more sovereignty under the pre-1979 sterling than it currently does as an EU protectorate.

I doubt it’ll ever actually be seriously considered, because that’d mean the UK would have the burden of ‘soaking in’ Ireland’s atrocious debt – and we’ve got our own deficit to sort out without adopting Ireland’s debt too.

But the shift of power in Ireland is very interesting. The very same people who were bombing our women & children in an Imperialist attempt to colonize Northern Ireland against their wishes, are now increasingly becoming open to ditching the Euro for the GBP.

I do have to make it clear that this does not mean a re-unification – simply the adoption of the currency and membership of the Commonwealth.. NOT the union.

Ditching the Euro for their own currency is impossible, they don’t have the gold reserves nor the cold hard cash to pull it off – it’d spiral the nation into complete bankruptcy.

So perhaps they see the GBP as their only way out if this fiscal treaty goes tits up which, by the way, it will.

The Irish are a great and proud people, they may have been tricked into voting yes – which is no crime, we, too, were tricked back in the 70s to voting yes for the EU – when we didn’t even vote on the EU, we voted on a common market not a super-state.

But once Ireland sees it is increasingly holding the weight of the EU’s economic crisis on its shoulders, crippling its self they’ll want an escape route – and it seems Sinn Fein has already started planning one.

Polls have stated over a third of Irish, and 43% of Sinn Fein are in favour of ditching the Euro for the GBP if things go tits up as an ‘escape route’ from the economic crisis and to retain their nation’s sovereignty (like I said, this has nothing to do with the union, just the protection that the Commonwealth offers and the economic freedoms the GBP would give Ireland), but there’s been no polls yet as to how the British public would feel about it.

It wouldn’t benefit us, we’d have to absorb Ireland’s debt into our economy, which would devalue the GBP. I like Ireland (yes, for you two that didn’t know, I was funning in f3), but our own economy is only just holding its head above Europe’s and getting back on track, absorbing Ireland’s skyrocketing debt along with it would drag us back into the European recession.

Interestingly, though, the Conservative Party has stated that Britons should keep an open mind and be prepared to help the Irish if and when the time comes – meaning the Tories are prepared to let the UK to sink into another economic crisis in the short-term to help our Irish neighbours, which I was surprised about – but what about the public?

Job losses, price of goods being raised, purchasing power declined, more riots, health care & education cuts etc etc all for the sake of helping Ireland’s economy? I fear the Tories are thinking too much about being “good neighbours” rather than thinking “F*ck them they wouldn’t do the same for us so why should we”.

Almost everyone now sees that, for Ireland, the euro has been a disaster. As early as 2001, Irish economists were warning that the boom was getting out of control, and that interest rates needed to go up. But, of course, there were no Irish interest rates any more: there was only the European Central Bank. Its policy of cheap money was arguably excessive even for the core European economies; for Ireland, it amounted to catastrophically pro-cyclical monetary policy. A credit bubble was inflated; the bust, when it came, was commensurately painful.

Denied the ability to devalue, undercut by sterling and obliged to borrow even more money in order to participate in the Greek bail-out, Ireland’s position has become calamitous: debt and unemployment are rising, prices and incomes are falling. GDP is down by an almost unbelievable 20 per cent from peak. And here’s the really bad news: these problems will carry on for as long as Ireland is in the euro. Bailout or no bailout, Eire’s economy diverges cyclically and structurally from Continental Europe: save by occasional and fleeting coincidence, its interest rates and exchange rates will always be wrong.

Alright, so the euro was a disaster. How, though, does Ireland get out of it? If it were simply to reissue its own currency, that currency would devalue, pushing up its debt level even further. This might be a lesser evil than continued euro membership, of course, but it is an evil none the less. Is there any solution?

Yes. Ireland could adopt the pound and treat its loans as having been issued in sterling. Immediately, Eire would be able to start exporting its way back to growth. And, because the UK and Ireland move in a synchronised, mid-Atlantic cycle, trade substantially with one another and have similar economic profiles, the problem of inappropriate monetary policy would disappear.

In theory, of course, Ireland could simply declare sterling to be its currency without asking anyone’s permission. But this would be unsatisfactory on several levels. For one thing, Ireland is a sovereign country, and would presumably want to be represented as such: it would, for example, want to appoint its share of members to the Monetary Policy Committee. And, of course, much of the advantage of such a merger would be lost if Britain did not agree to accept the sterling denomination of existing Irish loans.

Why should the UK be prepared to do such a thing?

Interestingly, when Mark Reckless, the ancestrally Irish MP for Rochester, raised the idea with the Europe Minister David Lidington at a parliamentary committee meeting yesterday, the response was friendly.

Ah, but could a Fianna Fáil government countenance rejoining the sterling area? It depends on the alternatives. Accepting an EU bail-out would mean sacrificing economic sovereignty, but wouldn’t solve the underlying problem. Adopting the pound, with a proper recognition of Irish independence (unlike the pre-1979 arrangement), would put Ireland on a sustainable road to recovery. It’s Brian Cowen’s call, obviously. But, as the euro-zone finance ministers line up to tell him what to do, we ought at least to let him know that, if he were to look for a different option, he could count on us as allies.

Tory MEP Hannan states: All I’m saying is that the UK should be prepared to offer a viable alternative if asked. It’s the least we owe our neighbours.