Sir, – With all due respect to Derek Scally (“We should not blame the German banks for the Irish economic crash”, August 18th) I rarely meet people who say the German banks caused the crash – there’s not enough space on this page to cover all the causes – but the despair comes from the subsequent fallout.
The simple fact is that two million taxpayers in an island nation at the western edge of Europe were left to carry the can in isolation, to the tune of €64 billion, despite this being an unprecedented collapse of a global integrated banking system that affected the entire EU.
And I don’t think even Mr Scally can deny that Chancellor Merkel was at the tiller of EU political decision-making when our EU colleagues coldly chose to hang us out to dry.
– Yours, etc,
ALAN KEALY
Blackrock
Co Dublin.