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THE TRUTH is that the world is laughing at the UK’s discomfiture over Brexit. The world will be mildly discommoded by whatever happens but it be will be amply compensated by the comedy of the UK’s stupidity made possible by ignorance of history and economics. For a long time much of the world really didn’t laugh at Britain – now it can, and does. The role of Ireland in frustrating Brexit is particularly gratifying. According to the BBC, “what alarms so many Tories is that after centuries of troubled Anglo-Irish relations it is the smaller of the two islands which appears to be exercising greater power for the first time”. Good, that’s justice. I’m relishing the Brexit difficulty that the English in particular are enduring after 850 years where Ireland was colonised, demonised, ridiculed or relegated to an afterthought, by its bigger neighbour. I can live with the temporary economic hit that we may take because latterly we’ve been doing fine, at least economically, anyway. Brexit also boosts our morale, making our own tawdry politics look relatively good – at least we don’t look nasty any more and this time it is not we who are in a parallel universe. I’m pleased with the irony that it’s an ex colony that’s inflicting the constitutional compromise on the UK: it might help English nationalists understand that if you inflict epochal constitutional prejudice on the neighbours there’s a price to be paid in dysfunctionality. Culturally, the UK has offered so much: in particular to literature, the popular arts especially music, and to humour. From the 1960s, until recently, Britain led the world in humour based on self-awareness, self-criticism, open-mindedness and irony. Yet Brexit is treated as a humourless parody, its protagonists hapless and led by a frumpy and now-abject PM. When “strong and stable” Theresa May says “I’m a bloody difficult woman”, “I stand ready to finish the job”, or “I’ll give everything I’ve got” we recoil because she is so incompetent and, because she is po-faced, frankly we revel in her humiliations. When she dances like an insect, when she takes off across Europe begging shivering atavistic geopolitical rivals to unravel the deal she’s just agreed, and failing to understand that a backstop cannot be time-limited and that the EU won’t budge from it, when she gets locked in her car or the conference scenery collapses around her, I’m afraid the world does laugh. Some might say that Britain taught us to. It was the master of subversive comedy: and specifically targeted cravenness, hypocrisy and class hangups. There was a time when Britain would have seen – not just that Brexit is bad but that it is funny. Mrs May is as uncharismatic as David Brent, her Ministers as principle-free as Jim Hacker or Hugh Abbot. Rees-Mogg recalls the Upper Class Twits from Monty Python, and Boris Johnson represents the swivel-eyed First World General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett from Black Adder. A swathe of British society seems to have taken its lead from Mind Your Language and Dad’s Army. But Britain’s consolation is that its come-uppance is comedy not – whatever Angela Merkel said – tragedy as, while there may well be anagnorisis and catharsis, there is likely to be a happy ending to Brexit. This is because first the concept of Brexit is largely based on false premises and because second its upshot is so bad that politics will inevitably, however long it takes, reverse it. The counterfactuality of the Brexit arguments derives principally from failure to understand that the loathed constraints on national self-rule are imposed by globalism not the EU. The UK has been anomalously unlucky that its ruling classes don’t seem to understand that the Big Idea of the EU is the economic benefits of trade which dwarf simple structural fund payouts, that they believe that the EU is conspiring against the UK and that the current deal is one-sided when it is not, that they fantasise that European industry depends on its UK trade and that EU membership removes £350m weekly from the National Health Service, that they obsess over the obligation to pay £39bn, as if it were not simply due – a long-term vouched bill. And the UK has been anomalously unlucky in its leaders: witless mediocrities masquerading as Winston Churchills, lionised in the Express and Telegraph; indulged even by the BBC. There is time for the misrepresentations to be forensically nailed and for the mediocrities to be replaced by politicians who are up to the imperatives of our times. All who in any way wish the UK well can take comfort in the general rule of history: countries tend to find equilibrium pursuing solutions that make them better off. The reasons for the Brexit mistake are complex. England has a delinquent education system which fails to teach enough people, including its leaders, history or economics. These disciplines which feature as standard in the curricula of schools in every other country in Europe teach that the EU has helped avoid war in Europe for the first generation in 150 years, and that the customs union and single market have increased wealth through exploitations of comparative advantages and trade, not primarily through transfers of structural funds. The lethal ignorance of these truths when combined with a widespread residual sense of British exceptionalism, by which most mean English superiority, lit a UK anti-EU fire that would largely burn the UK itself. The upside here is that if an ignoble reconciliation with the EU extinguishes the fire it might also liquidate the arsonists too. England needs to find a home at its political centre for its cleverest and most imaginative, moral and outward looking people. But there is a problem with the Little English. They’ve been educated for simplicity. They are suckers for homespun superannuated guff about getting on your bike and the University of Life and for aphorisms like “We have had enough of experts” and “Brexit means Brexit”. The bulk of English people

THE RIGHT to Private Property and private ownership of goods tends to divide the Right from the Left. In Locke and Hobbes, it is the central human right as it has always been from a Whig-Liberal or indeed a Neo-Liberal perspective. From a Marxist perspective it is an unqualified evil and even those who accept it as a human right from a leftist perspective do so under characteristically qualified conditions. I have not noted much enthusiasm in Village magazine for property rights. Striking its inevitable balance, the Irish Constitution subjects property ownership to the common good, whatever that means. It has been much elaborated and is more progressively interpreted than is probably widely believed, by Irish courts, especially the Supreme Court. What has not been developed in Ireland is Article 45 of the constitution whose stated object is to establish social and economic rights. In this respect it has always been open as the South Africans, Canadians and others have done to establish a right to housing. In India they are defined as a basic survival right intrinsic to life and General Comments 4 (1991) and 7 (1997) of the UN Economic and Social Rights Committee – on the right to adequate housing – recognise that the human right to adequate housing, which is thus derived from the right to an adequate standard of living, is of central importance for the enjoyment of all economic, social and cultural rights. The UN Declaration of Human Rights and its Covenant on Economic and Social Right article 11 (1) requires that its 153 States parties “recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing”. Article 26 of the South African Constitution stipulates that the state has an obligation to build adequate housing and is prohibited from arbitrarily evicting anyone. Subsequent jurisprudence has established that before an eviction there should be meaningful consultation through arbitration and that no one should be evicted without having somewhere to go. The state also has a duty to have a housing plan and to build houses. In contrast the courts in Ireland are powerless: once processes have been undertaken for eviction or dispossession and those processes comply with the formalities then that is that. A grandmother can be jailed for contempt of court as she seeks to repossess the house from which she has been evicted. In February the Master of the Irish Court was bumped by a High Court judge out of his role in managing debt repayments as he was blocking banking repossessions and was perceived to be anti-bank. Given his role as a filter of claims always susceptible of appeal to the High Court which almost always over-ruled him, when offered the chance, there is some, not much, merit in the acid view of Judge Garrett Simons that he was giving people false hope by staving off the evil day. Perhaps that seems true from the perspective of a positivistic judge with a planning background who through his filters sees no role for the courts in interfering in social and economic justice issues centring on housing. On the other hand it would not be false hope if it yielded real solutions and radical change. Elsewhere in this edition of Village Tony Lowes explains the evolving right to a good environment in Ireland. It would not be qualitatively different in a country where homelessness is a universal preoccupation if the right to housing crystallised judicially. Ireland has witnessed an upsurge of NGOs and, depending on your perspective, busybodies, clogging up its busy courts, often as lay litigants, agitating for some measure of protection for the dispossessed. The Land League which I have represented is one and of course New Beginnings, a separate initiative before in effect it was flogged to the banks with a profit motive. On the other hand for soft liberals and leftists an overarching concern is that those who massively over-borrowed while others kept their discipline are not to be empathised with as they are part of the casino capitalism problem. Accepting the validity of the blandishments pf property speculators or professional hypocrites is Sleeping with the Enemy. Well yes and no. Firstly, a common Irish failing is to separate out the dancer from the dance. However, in the interests and fairness it is essential to depersonalise and be objective. One of the defects in populism is that it allows demagogues to showboat and scream even when they are the authors of their own downfall. Village readers will dislike populism, demagogues, the property brigade and presumably people who are the authors of their own downfall. But it does not make it unreasonable to support rights to housing – for the following reasons: 1: That the requirement constitutionally (and for example under the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) is merely to affordable housing of an appropriate scale – possibly rented – not to the freehold in a ten-bed in Killiney – even if Jerry Beades can justify it; and even those sinking in greed-generated debt are entitled to a humble abode in a just society for without it all dignity and much capacity is lost. The indisputable fact that some of the agents in property-rights activism have lost sight of this entirely should not blind us to the fact that the imperative is none the less forceful for being so limited. It should be conceded that dishonest transfers of assets and the Family Home Protection Act have created a justified sense that in its execution some people are unfairly getting to keep enormous homes when the constitutional right is, and should be, limited to modest lodging. 2. That though the goal at least for those on the left may in theory be equality, in practice we are dealing with the crooked timber of humanity and in Ireland some of the most abject are boomtown debtors, by definition still reeling after more than a decade. The right to equality does not

Throughout its 20-year history, the Euro has been depicted as a crucial element of the development of the European Union. It was supposed to strengthen the European economy, bring EU Member States closer together and increase EU citizens’ prosperity. Yet, after the economic crisis in 2008/09 experienced by the southern Member States and Ireland, the reputation of the Euro was undermined and its weaknesses brutally revealed. By Anna Jermak Love it or loathe it – what it is The Euro is the official currency of 19 of the 28 EU Member States, used by more than 339 million people, and the second-largest currency in the world (after the US dollar). It was introduced by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty as part of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), involving the coordination of economic and fiscal policies, a common monetary policy, and a common currency. The Euro was launched in 1999 and three years later came into circulation. Big dreams – how it all began In order to understand the reasons for the introduction of the current European currency, the Euro, one needs to go back to the 1950s, and the genesis of the European Economic Community (1957), when the European leaders first talked of the creation of the single market with free movement of trade, services, capital and persons. The common currency, together with common monetary policy and co-ordinated economic and fiscal policies, was essential for its completion. There was no space for multiple small and vulnerable currencies in the fast-developing business world – a single currency, as presented by the 1989 Delors Report, was the capstone of Europe’s single market. Indeed, one large Euro market would enhance European economic integration, stability and growth. As there was no need to exchange currencies in the Member States which adopted the euro, both consumers and traders were provided with greater confidence, opportunity and security. The adoption of the common currency also strengthened the EU’s position in the global economy. However, leaders like French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl also believed that a single European currency would apply irresistible pressure for political integration. It would lead eventually to their ultimate goal: a European political federation akin to that of the United States. They saw that to function smoothly, monetary union requires a banking union – a single supervisor for all the banks and a union-wide deposit insurance scheme. Otherwise, banks overseen only by their national supervisors would be allowed to undertake cross-border lending operations irrespective of the impact on neighbouring countries. And in the absence of a union-wide deposit insurance scheme, a run on the banks in one country could infect the banking systems of others. Furthermore, to operate smoothly, a monetary union requires an integrated fiscal system, like in Australia and the US. States that give up their monetary policy to a higher authority can no longer adjust it to suit domestic conditions. They can no longer lower interest rates to encourage investment when the national economy slows. Of course, if the partners operate an integrated fiscal system, prosperous members can shift resources to depressed regions, compensating for the impossibility of interest-rate cuts. The problem is that banking and fiscal union will only be regarded as legitimate if those responsible for their operation can be held accountable for their decisions by citizens. That prompted a logic for more power for the European Parliament – and less for national legislatures. Monetary integration creates a certain logic and associated irresistible pressure for political integration. But the politics of Europe and the world since 1992 militated against political integration. Without it, the unreadiness of the EU for a common currency back in 1999 was an accident waiting to happen. Some economists did predict this. For instance, it had been predicted by economist Martin Feldsted two years before in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine: In the beginning, there would be important disagreements among the EMU member countries about the goals and methods of monetary policy. These would be exacerbated whenever the business cycle raised unemployment in a particular country or group of countries. These economic disagreements could contribute to a more general distrust among the European nations. The ugly truth The Euro duly imploded as 2008 turned into 2009 when Greece, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Italy and Ireland were almost destroyed economically as part of the price for being parts of the Eurozone. The impetus for the debt crisis within the Eurozone was the banking crisis in the US in 2007/2008 – 2009. It affected the global economy, and European countries were not exceptions. Greece, previously so desperate to become the twelfth member of the Eurozone, has suffered the most. Its fraudulent entry, lack of fiscal reforms and unsustainable budget deficits made its debt so large that it exceeded the size of its whole economy. As the banking systems within the Eurozone had become much larger and mightier than their host economies, the Greek government was in practice unable to rescue national banks or to pay debts without the assistance of the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund or the EU. Austerity measures were introduced, leading to national protests, riots and anti-EU sentiment. In Ireland – the first Eurozone State that fell into recession – the crisis was aggravated by the bursting of a property bubble, which caused loan defaults. In order to rescue Irish banks which had financed properties through now precarious loans, the government took on their debts. That led to the deficit, public spending cuts and tax increases, and left the government in Dublin with no option but to join the EU and International Monetary Fund bailout programmes. The debt crisis followed a similar course in the rest of the countries, although on a smaller scale. In effect, a banking union – a single supervisor for all the banks and a union-wide deposit insurance scheme – was introduced in 2012. It prevented banks overseen only by their national supervisors from undertaking cross-border lending operations irrespective of the impact on neighbouring countries,