Enda Kenny urges Greece to follow Irish debt example

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has told his Greek counterpart Alexis Tsipras to follow the Irish recovery programme if he wants a deal to keep his country in the euro.

He told a meeting of EU leaders in Brussels last night that Greece could come up with alternative measures to those being proposed by its creditors, as Ireland had done, but they had to make economic sense.

Mr Kenny firmly ruled out Irish support for a write-off of Greek debt but an Irish official said the Taoiseach had stated his support for “debt reprofiling” – altering the repayment terms.

In Galway, Tánaiste Joan Burton accused the Syriza-led Greek government of spending more time "lecturing" the rest of Europe than running its own economy.

At the summit, Mr Kenny repeated comments made earlier to reporters in which he expressed doubts about the viability of the tax-raising measures proposed by Athens.

He said Ireland, as one of the three countries in an EU-IMF bailout programme, had emerged by pursuing pro-growth policies and not by increasing income tax, VAT and PRSI as was being proposed in Greece.

“We put up alternatives to those measures that were proposed in order to keep a pro-growth policy and to make our country competitive and to provide jobs for our people.”

Overshadowed

Mr Kenny was speaking at an EU summit that was overshadowed by the deepening Greek crisis after negotiations between the Greek prime minister, Mr Tsipras, and lenders broke down again without agreement.

With Greece moving closer to default as an IMF repayment looms next Tuesday, finance ministers made tentative plans to reconvene in Brussels tomorrow in the hope that a proposal may be ready to be approved.

This could still leave time for the Greek parliament to vote on any bailout proposal on Sunday with the German Bundestag voting on the package on Monday. But with Mr Tsipras facing significant resistance from within his own party and from the Greek public to accede to a deal that requires further austerity, it was unclear whether he was prepared to agree to a deal without some promise of debt relief in the future.

Arriving at the summit, German chancellor Angela Merkel said negotiators had "not yet made the necessary progress" in the talks, adding that "in some places we feel that we are falling back a bit."