Enda’s mate Juncker has lost all trace of credibility

MOST people would assume that ‘JeanClaude from Brussels’ was the action man hero dispatching villains in martial arts films.

But the real ‘Muscles from Brussels’ are another two Jean-Claudes, Juncker and Trichet: one is the EU president, the other the former president of European Central Bank.

And frankly, neither of the two Jean-Claudes seems to give a Von Damme about you, me or anybody else here… except maybe their mutual pal, Enda Kenny.

Messieurs Juncker and Trichet are zealots for a federal Europe, an ambition that a majority of EU citizens oppose.

Just a week after he was installed as EU president, Jean-Claude Juncker’s credibility is shot and his moral authority sundered.

He led the mob in Brussels for austerity, railed against the Double-Irish and he was just as enthusiastic for the former as he was passionate against the latter.

BUT his double standards were exposed when it was revealed that the tax deal known as ‘ DoubleLux’ was nurtured on his watch as minister of finance and prime minister of Luxembourg.

The ‘Double-Lux’ is a sort of mirror of the ‘ Double-Irish’, where companies can slash their tax bills by a soft-shoe shuffle of profits that move between jurisdictions with a minimum of tax.

Neither is illegal but it is the sort of thing that Juncker now opposes in Brussels but ignored back in Luxembourg.

How he can present himself as the reformer of the EU when he approved the same sort of hushhush tax deals as prime minister of Luxembourg that he so publicly disapproves of now?

Juncker is an old friend of Enda’s, who nominated him as the European People’s Party candidate, of which they are both members, for the EU presidency.

The Taoiseach’s favour was returned with interest when Juncker appointed Phil Hogan as EU Agriculture Commissioner just as his role in the Irish Water debacle was unfolding.

Trichet had no problems doing Germany’s bidding and shafting Ireland when he was president of the ECB, yet I will be surprised if he turns up at the banking inquiry. If he does, he has an interesting argument for Irish politicians: that Ireland was better governed by the Troika than it is by the current coalition.

The Troika may have targeted Irish taxpayers by protecting bondholders.

However, the conditions they laid down were a homing device for foreign investors to Ireland. HISTORIANS are ruminating about the 25th anniversary of 1989, and not just because of Taylor Swift’s birth that year or her record-selling album 1989.

No, the fall of the Berlin Wall was an historic event that I happened to catch because I was in the German capital to attend a concert by the artist then currently known as Prince.

I went through Checkpoint Charlie to East Berlin and recalled that my union, the NUJ, was hosting and sponsoring a visit to Dublin by a pro-government East German youth group.

An Irish band called The Train Now Leaving performed at a Dublin gig for the young East Germans without a hint of irony or even embarrassment from the NUJ.

Those were the days.