Loans to Ireland Bill

My hon. Friend asks a rhetorical question. The answer is that I am not sure where Ireland was at that time. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Chancellor that we should allow the Irish to have their own domestic policy. That is why it would not be right for us to interfere with their low corporation tax policy—it should be for them to decide. However, the other side of the coin must be that we let the Irish take the consequences and accept the responsibility for what happens as a result. We cannot say, ““We're going to help pay for the consequences while not being able to influence the policy.”” I find what is proposed very intellectually trying to deal with. When we have a border—our hon. Friends from Northern Ireland have made their points about this—that low corporation tax policy makes things much more difficult. Indeed, it is possible to argue that we have lost the corporate headquarters of major international organisations from London to Dublin as a result of Ireland's low corporation tax policy. Now we are subsidising that policy, the consequences of which are that the Irish have been unable to meet their financial obligations and are desperate for additional loans. I am not convinced that we should be getting involved with British taxpayers' money. It would be different if we did not have an awful national debt crisis, but we do. One consequence of the Bill, if it goes through today, may be to send out a signal to our constituents that says, ““Don't worry, the debt crisis is not as bad as we've been telling you,”” because we can afford to add to that debt further by giving a soft loan to the Irish. At the same time, we are having to argue to our constituents that we cannot put pressure on the banks to give more soft loans to businesses, even if those businesses go bust or cannot expand as a result, with all the damaging consequences for employment that that would have in our country, so I am not convinced.