Sir, – A Leavy (February 3rd) makes the common mistake of using the term "Greek debt" as a catch-all for the debts imposed on Greece by the troika without acknowledging there are two elements to debt in Greece, and Ireland or Spain. One part of the debt relates to the cost of running the actual state itself and providing the services citizens should rightly expect from a wealthy advanced EU member state and the other part relates to the debts added to the taxpayer to pay for losses incurred in the private banking sector. You hear it all the time when reporters ask a German taxpayer "should the Greeks pay their debts", and of course they reply yes. Why not try asking "should the Greek taxpayer have to pay the private debts of the private banking sector"?
Greece, like Ireland, has a primary account surplus, which means the state raises enough tax to cover its running cost, but when you then add back the interest and costs of servicing the debts incurred to bail out the private banking sector then that surplus becomes a deficit.
No one in Greece is disputing that the dysfunctional administration of the state over decades allowed endemic cronyism and tax avoidance by the self-employed professional middle class and the wealthy (sound familiar?), needs to tackled by Greece itself, but that problem won’t be fixed overnight. Nor is anyone in Greek denying that the debts incurred for running the state should be wiped out because they should rightly be the responsibility of the Greek taxpayer. What Greece is asking is that the portion of its debt that relates to the private banking sector should be Europeanised because forcing the Greek taxpayer to borrow money it cannot afford to repay, from German (and other) taxpayers, at the expense of ripping the social fabric of Greek society, so that the borrowed money can then be paid back to German (and other) banks is stupid, both morally and economically, not to mention inefficient.
Perhaps if Ireland’s political class had not been so gutless in 2010 and after 2011 and had been more forceful in standing up for the interests of the Irish people, the debt situation could have been faced up to years ago without the need for mass emigration and generational damage to society. – Yours, etc,
DESMOND FitzGERALD,
Canary Wharf,
London.