The unwieldy beast

Sir — Following on from the two excellent articles by Colm McCarthy ‘Ireland has no special place in the affections of our ‘allies’ in Europe’ (Sunday

Independent, September 11) and Brendan Keenan ‘Once again, Ireland finds itself a mere pawn in a much bigger game’ (Irish Independent, September 8), I think it is important that the penny drops with the Irish people that we don’t have, and probably never had ‘any friends’ in Europe.

This cliched expression was used ad nauseam over the years by our politicians when it came to various referenda to sell the virtues of the EU and its institutions.

Yet it is pretty clear with the latest Apple ruling that Ireland is once again being used as some sort of guinea pig, just like we were during the whole austerity agenda.

The manner in which we were aggressively pushed into a bailout (which we might have needed anyway), charged exorbitant interest rates, forced to pay virtually all bondholders to ensure no contagion spread across the European banking system, was at best deeply unjust and at worst a form of bullying.

No one stood up to the ECB and in particular the EU Commission and demanded fairness and a decent deal.

We were patronised by the big two, Merkel accepting we were what turned out to be a meaningless ‘special case’ and Sarkozy giving Enda tousled hair for his trouble.

The member of the Troika who showed most understanding and had advocated a better deal for us was ironically the IMF, traditionally the big bad wolf!

My own view is that we have less valid arguments (moral and otherwise) with the Apple case than we had with the bailout programme, yet here we now have a queue of the great and good defending our sovereignty and tax independence. That ship has sailed, I am afraid and it will fall on deaf ears as will our wants and needs with Brexit.

The sad thing is that we are so far in at this stage, we can’t extract ourselves from the unwieldy beast that is Europe. Eamon O Bearra

Adare, Co Limerick