For months now, Italian economic commentators have occasionally focused on Ireland, lamenting the fact that this "is no longer a happy island". The poor old Celtic Tiger has come in for a deal of disrespectful comment with Italy's authoritative financial daily, "Il Sole 24 Ore" recently commenting
that the he (the Tiger) has become "a harmless and frightened animal on the lookout for a safe place in which to lie low and wait for the storm to pass".
When the EU statistics office Eurostat issued figures this week, many commentators highlighted the fact that Ireland led the deficit ratings with a 7.1% result. Most of those same commentators, however, added that Italy still recorded the highest debt-to-GDP figure, at 105.8%.
All commentators acknowledge that this is an especially delicate moment and they have tended to report the Irish government's attempts to meet the crisis, be it the nationalization of Allied Irish, or the tough Budget earlier this month, as either inevitable or the best that could be done in very difficult circumstances. For instance, when
The Irish Timescontacted Milan's prestigious Bocconi University in search of an opinion on the Irish economy, no economist was willing to point a critical finger at Ireland or the Irish government's handling of the crisis.
Some commentators, however, are not quite so shy. Economics agency CCS news recently predicted that the current crisis represented a death knell for Irish tax incentives, aimed at attracting overseas investments, saying:
Those tax breaks have been a huge success for Ireland but their days may be numbered. European Union help, in the context of its anti-crisis package, will inevitably mean that Ireland will be forced to introduce the same levels of (corporate) taxation as the rest of the EU, something that countries like Germany and Italy have wanted for years. Not for nothing, the US Chamber of Commerce in Dublin recently announced that many (US) companies would soon be moving to other countries