Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

THE INTERNATIONAL financial crisis has caught the European Union quite ill-prepared for its devastating impact on Ireland and the other 26 member-states and at a loss to chart a common way through it.

Despite the great progress made towards a single market and a single currency over the last 20 years there is no equivalent regulatory framework for cross-border banking, nor any central tax authority capable of responding at EU level in the same way that national governments have had to do in the last week. The great unwillingness to engage between member-states at a time of unprecedented crisis, coupled with the failure to convene a European Council meeting over the last 10 days, is damaging to the whole EU project.