Minister avoids crystal ball and sticks to the script

No predictions from a seasoned politician

ANYONE WHO came to hear Michael Noonan predict the future in Berlin yesterday went home disappointed. The Minister for Finance delighted his audience of bankers and diplomats by confessing that his poor record of predicting the future dated back to a 1989 trip to the still-divided Berlin.

At the time, he slipped away from a dull political conference with Fine Gael colleague Maurice Manning and the two ended up at the Berlin Wall.

“I said to Maurice, ‘There’s another 50 years in this’ and he, being a historian, said, ‘No, 100 years’,” recalled Noonan. “It was gone six months later. So you can be very sceptical about any predictions in my speech; my record in Berlin is very poor.”

Speaking in Commerzbank’s Brandenburg Gate headquarters, in the former no-man’s land between east and west Berlin, Noonan took on the task of talking up Ireland’s bailout progress so far while talking down rising expectations in Germany about their favourite bailout recipient.

Noonan explained how Ireland was “sunk” by private bank debt, transferred into sovereign debt by the last government.

“It wasn’t totally an Irish decision to guarantee this. That was pushed very hard by people in Frankfurt,” he said diplomatically.

“There were worries that . . . for a bank to go down in Ireland would have an effect in Britain and affect French and German banks.”

He said the reforms demanded by the EU-IMF programme would have been sensible government policy even without a bailout and that there was thus no basis for anti-German or anti-European feeling in Ireland.

“There is increasing cynicism in Ireland about the European project and we have to be careful about that,” he said.

“There are people who say that complying with the programme is a manifestation of German imperialism.

“I say that to have an imperialist view, you need an imperialist idea, and I see no sign of that nor of any stakeholders prepared to sign on to that. For people who say this, I refer them to read their history.”