Ireland to Ditch the € ?

[Creeping Death]

Ireland on the Brink of Collapse

They can barely let the words pass their lips, but some of the EU's most important policymakers were forced this week to discuss what was once unthinkable: that at least one of the 16 eurozone countries might be on the brink of ditching the single currency.

Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, admitted that the 10-year-old eurozone was under "extreme strain", with weaker countries struggling to keep their economies afloat in the face of the devaluation of other currencies, such as sterling and the dollar.

Joschka Fischer, Germany's former foreign minister, darkly suggested that we would soon find out whether the eurozone would turn out to be "a disaster", while the German finance ministry is vacillating on whether it would be prepared to bail out insolvent states.

The current thinking is that Germany and France, as the strongest economies in the zone and "lenders of last resort", would have to bail out failing states: the prospect of the eurozone breaking up would bring the future of the EU into question.

But the most startling fact to emerge this week is that the country which is seen as the most vulnerable, and therefore the most likely to ditch the euro, is not Slovenia, or Cyprus, or Greece, but Ireland.

Haven't they been 'on the brink of collapse' for a couple of months now?

Ireland is definitely not going to "ditch" Euro. That would be suicidal. The extremely minor risk for the € to cease to exist comes from Germany. They're the only country that could survive throwing away the Euro.

Also it's not $ that has been devaluing, but €, despite higher interest rates. And those interest rates are going to be cut to near-zero.

Any country leaving the Euro will not do it from a position of weakness, but strength.

This article is misleading.

[SwordoftheVistula]

Good points.

The housing/construction/immigration boom is perhaps more honestly described in this article than elsewhere, but under it's current structure Ireland is more likely than any other country on the Euro to recover from the recession.

You are correct in noting that the Euro has been devaluing compared to the dollar (as has the British pound), this is due to the fact that these economies relied heavily on subsidized export economies, and the export market in the US has dried up as upper and upper middle class people here have experienced a drop in income.