Single currency on target for 1999 launch

JOHN Bruton has put what Europe is about simply: "Safe streets, secure jobs, sound money, and a peaceful world."

In Tralee two weeks ago Dick Spring and his foreign ministers were dealing with the latter. Later this week in Dublin Nora Owen brings justice ministers together to try to make the streets safer for children. Over the weekend, at the Ecofin meeting in Dublin, Ruairi Quinn was laying the basis of a sound currency, the euro.

That's no mean task. Writing in his classic history of money, J.K. Galbraith warns that although "money is a very old convenience, the notion that it is a reliable artefact, to be accepted without scrutiny or question, is in all respects a very occasional thing - mostly a circumstance of the last century.

History has not been kind to those who, in one form or another, debased the coinage, and no state in our century remembers that better than Germany. And so, if Verona in the spring put up the skeleton of the fortress that will be the single currency, Dublin installed the plumbing and the defences, largely to a Bundesbank design.

The meeting put in place procedures that are as automatic and immune to political pressure as the Maastricht Treaty will allow, backed up by fines and other forms of sanctions against backsliders.

There is still work to be done, notably on toughening multilateral surveillance, the level of fines, and the crucial definition of the treaty terms "exceptional and temporary", the only grounds on which euro participants may depart from the 3 per cent deficit target without penalties. But the principles are agreed.

It's full steam ahead now.

Even the British Chancellor, Mr Kenneth Clarke, who last year said there was a 40 per cent chance the project would not get off the ground this century, admitted on Saturday that the momentum towards monetary union was now becoming unstoppable.

"Compared with a year ago, I get the feeling ever more clearly it is going to go ahead on time," he said.

Mr Quinn was his usual confident self. "A lot of the particular bridges or difficulties associated with the single currency project have been, identified and successfully crossed: ... We are now on course, I believe, to provide the Dublin summit in December with a definitive set of proposals which will ensure that economic and monetary union will commence on January 1st, 1999."

Around Europe other key ingredients are falling into place. Dr Helmut Kohl got his budget cuts through, against expectations. President Jacques Chirac's creative accounting with the France Telecom pension fund seems likely to win Commission approval under the Union's strict national accounting rules, putting France firmly on target.

Belgium and Spain have their budget packages in place... Short of insurrection in France, some seven to eight countries seem almost certain to meet the 3 per cent deficit criterion for 1997.

And, just as importantly as the economic preconditions, there is, as Mr Quinn reminded the Institute of European Affairs on Friday night, an extraordinary political determination to see this through. In the end, he argued, we must not forget that this is not just about economics but the political will to construct a new Europe.