IRISH people were bemused by the amount of heated division that Europe caused in British politics, the Fianna Fail leader said in Oxford last night.
While Ireland was attached to its independence as much as any state, it saw the advantages of having links and a measure of interdependence with other countries, Mr Bertie Ahern told the Oxford European Affairs Society.
Ireland hoped that Britain and Ireland would be able to join a European Monetary Union together, Mr Ahern said. "I find it hard to imagine that Britain will want to be left behind again, as it was in 1957, at the time of the Treaty of Rome, or in 1978 at the time of the EMS, and find itself trying to catch up afterwards."
If Britain did not join, Mr Ahern said, Ireland would be faced with the same difficulty as in December 1978, when it joined the EMS without Britain, ending the 152 year link with sterling. This could pose great difficulties for the Irish agri food industry and some other sectors heavily dependent on exports to Britain.
"Nevertheless," Mr Ahern continued, "there is quite a lot of support for the idea that the whole logic of Ireland's position since our entry into Europe must be to go forward. . . The alternative is to relapse into the dependent status of being generally regarded once again as an economic satellite of Britain in a sterling zone. . with a loss of sovereignty to Europe was misguided, Mr Ahern said. Acting together extended the possibility of sovereignty. In any case, he added, the most sovereign countries in recent times had been places like Cuba, North Korea and Albania, which were impoverished.
He pointed to the "remarkable fact" that the US in recent years had succeeded in creating large numbers of jobs. Even if these were not particularly highly paid, they gave people the opportunity "to get their foot on the ladder".
Mr Ahern added: "Left wing opinion and some trade unionists tend to be much too disdainful of the American achievement in this regard. We should try to combine the best of American style enterprise culture with the greater social solidarity that is characteristic of Europe."