An Irishman's Diary

THEY WANT TO turn us into the Africans of Europe, the man said, and there was no mistaking the venom in his tone.

I was in Patras, the Greek port and its third largest city. It was Sunday morning and I was trying to return a hired car. I had parked the car outside a church that was close to the office of the car hire firm.

Walking back towards the office I noticed the illegal immigrants/economic refugees who slept in a bit of waste ground near the entrance to the port. They were from such troubled countries as Iran and Afghanistan. Earlier in my travels around Greece a man in Athens had said that every time the Americans started a war, the number of people who entered Europe illegally, through Greece, increased.

When I was returning to the car with the man from the car hire firm, I nodded towards the unfortunate refugees and made some comment. However my invitation to him to express pity for the refugees' plight, was instead met with a diatribe about the Germans.

The Germans, he said, were conducting an economic experiment (the euro), and using Greece as a type of lab rat. The Germans had invaded Greece during the second World War and caused huge infrastructural damage for which they had never paid. Now they were once more seeking to conquer Greece, though this time using non-military means.

During my time there I had had a number of conversations with Greeks, and one Greece-resident German, about the financial crisis that was convulsing the EU's most eastern member. There had been a lot of harsh comments made about the Germans, but no one had used such a tone of undisguised hatred.

Greece, he said, would be forced out of the euro and back to the drachma. The Germans would then be able to buy Greek property at what for them would be knock-down prices. Look at our country, he said. It is the most beautiful in Europe. The Germans would buy up whole swathes of Greek land, become the owners of millions of Greek homes. The Greeks would then become the servants of these foreigners, serving them food in Greek restaurants, and cleaning their Greek holiday homes. The Germans, he said, want to make the Greeks the Africans of Europe.

He looked like he was in his mid-to-late-40s and it was obvious the strains created by the collapse of the Greek economy were getting to him.

His parents, he said, had suffered during the second World War. They had been poor but they had worked hard, believing that their children would have chances that they had never had. He too, he said, had believed up to recently that his children would have better opportunities in life than he had had. However, he now believed that his children would be poorer than he has been. He had little love for his own government, but it was clear he believed the Germans were primarily to blame.

The conversation reminded me of ones I had in Eastern Europe in the winter of 1990. I was a participant in the Journalistes en Europe programme (since ended) and was travelling to Bucharest on my first assignment. A hotel manager in Budapest expressed disbelief when he heard I had freely chosen to go to Romania. He had a visceral dislike of the country and its inhabitants. He told me they had sent secret agents across the border into Hungary to poison the pigs in Hungarian pig farms. He called colleagues over to meet the crazy Irish journalist who, having had a choice to visit any country in Europe he wanted to, had chosen Romania! Unbelievable, they all agreed. Unbelievable.

It was less than a year after the killing of Ceausescu and the collapse of his regime. I met a lot of very admirable and kind people in Romania, including a journalist who brought me to a "modern" apartment block that had been built without a central heating system. Outside it was -20 degrees Celsius and inside the small apartments the residents I met huddled around pot bellied stoves they had installed themselves, and in which they burned wood they collected during the day in the city's parks.

But as well as kindness I also encountered a shocking amount of open racism. Gypsies, Asians, and Jews were popular targets. It was as if they were somehow to blame for the sorry state the country was in.

Likewise, later, in Estonia, I was shocked by the openly expressed, though perhaps more understandable, dislike the ethnic Estonians had for the Russians that lived in their midst. It was the kind of dislike that can easily be transformed into oppression, and conflict.

What was very clear that winter was the stabilising effect the European Union had on political debate in much of Eastern Europe. People knew that if they indulged their nationalistic animosities it would interfere with their chance to become members of the union. And membership of the union was seen by many as a sure way of securing a better future for their children.

The man I met in Patras blamed the union, and the Germans, for the bleak future he felt sure his children were facing. It is the sort of attitude that is toxic to the European project, and provides fertile ground for the type of nationalistic animosities the union hoped could be confined to history.