THE relatively unknown phenomenon of Euro scepticism is alive and well in Italian political life.
Last week at the very moment that the Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, was being reassured by the caretaker Italian Prime Minister, Mr Lamberto Dini, about Italy's current term of EU Presidency and its commitment to European integration Italian Euro sceptics recruited a new and immensely powerful ally in Mr Gianfranco Fini, leader of the neo Fascist Alleanza Nazionale.
While Mr Bruton was having lunch at Palazzo Chigi in Rome with the Prime Minister, Mr Dini, the neo fascist leader was guest of honour at a lawyers' dinner also in Rome, where he said
"Italy must renegotiate the convergency criteria fixed by the Maastricht Treaty. We can't put our head into a hangman's noose prepared by the central banks and German interests, co ordinated by the Bundesbank."
Mr Fini is not a man to be ignored. He, more than anyone else, has not only prompted but also prolonged the current political crisis by refusing to endorse a second mandate for the former banker Mr Dini, the man whose "technical" government stepped in when the seven month government of the media tycoon, Mr Silvio Berlusconi, fell apart in December 1994.
Along with Mr Berlusconi, Mr Fini is the major leader on the right. More than that, recent opinion polls put him ahead of his erstwhile ally with a recent survey suggesting that if an election were held immediately, his party would be the biggest winner, with 23.4 per cent of the vote.
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that, one day soon, Mr Fini might fulfil the role of Italian prime minister. As such, will he then pursue a new and radically different EU line than that taken by Italy since the 1957 Treaty of Rome?
Mr Fini's remarks represent an important break with the custom and practice of Italian politics. Until now, the European Union was neither a contentious issue on the domestic political front nor even a matter for serious debate. Everyone, on the left or right, was in favour of "Europa", and, at the same time, nobody paid it a blind bit of attention.
Mr Antonio Giolitti, grandson of a famous turn of century Italian prime minister and himself a Socialist finance minister in the 1960s as well as an EEC commissioner, recently told L'Espresso magazine "While I was part of the centre left government, I didn't once hear EEC affairs discussed at cabinet meetings.
"On the contrary, our membership of the EEC was used for domestic political purposes. .. People still remark tome with incredulity of the only time that an Italian, the Christian Democrat, Franco Maria Malfatti, was nominated president of the European Commission but opted to resign so as not to remain shut out of Rome politics."
Italian "Euro indifference" has proved a double edged sword. On the one hand, it was correct and, just that nearly all Italian political factions, in the immediate postwar years, welcomed the European movement as part of a process of international rehabilitation after the misery, suffering and disgrace of Mussolini's Fascist dictatorship.
On the other hand, such across the board agreement and consequent lack of debate on, and lack of attention paid to, Italy's role in the EU has literally cost Italy dear.
The historian Paul Ginsborg recently had this to say about Italy's European experience, when writing in the review Passato E Presente "An incapacity to negotiate favourable terms, delays in the presentation of projects and failure to spend allotted funds, on a larger scale than either Portugal or Greece, presents an unmistakable picture of Italian incompetence."
Ginsborg goes on to suggest that Italian "distraction" allowed Italy agree to Common Agriculture Policies which effectively favoured Northern European economies at the expense of its own Mediterranean farmers and farming.
An Italian historian such as Silvano Lanaro goes further than Ginsborg, arguing that the European ideal has never really convinced Italians, suggesting instead that their real role model in the post war years of economic revival has been the US.
Now that, for once, EU affairs have become a domestic polemic and that full membership (participation in the single currency, for example) is about to cost Italians dear in terms of fiscal rectitude and inevitably higher taxes, could it be that "Euro scepticism" will prove a winning card?
Is Mr Fini, the man who just two years ago called Mussolini "the greatest statesman of the century", about to lead Italy down a nationalist, anti EU road of which his illustrious predecessor in the black boots might well have been proud? Watch this space.