Ireland didn’t just grow on Brussels sprouts

Opening a two-week series of extracts from the Lisbon Treaty, a Wall Street Journal editorial has launched an attack on Brian Lenihan, the Irish finance minister’s claim a No vote on the 2 October referendum would “signal to the world that Ireland has retreated into economic isolation” leading to “a capital flight and higher interest rates.” “It should hardly need stating,” the business daily notes, “that Mr. Lenihan is peddling phantom terrors to scare the Irish people into voting Yes.” While it’s commonplace to suggest that Ireland’s recently terminated period of growth was due to “EU largesse”, WSJ argues that “Ireland sucked on the teat of EU regional aid for two and a half decades without discernible effect. By the mid-1980s, it was still a poor country by European standards.” Only when the state began a campaign of supply-side tax cuts did its economy enter its boom phase. “The days of the Celtic Tiger are gone for the moment, but they have given Ireland an economic base on which to build that is in no way dependent on the benediction of Brussels bureaucrats.” Nor should a Yes vote, it concludes, be based on “fear-mongering and dark threats.”