Loans to Ireland Bill

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds). He made many powerful points, especially his last one. I note that the Bill is called the Loans to Ireland Bill, not the Loans to the Irish Republic Bill. I wonder whether the Government have had some foresight, and whether some of the loans will actually be provided to Northern Ireland, to help to reduce corporation tax there. Perhaps there is some hope in that regard. I want to start by saying that we have an excellent Chancellor of the Exchequer and a first-class Treasury team, including my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who has the misfortune to be at the Dispatch Box to listen to my remarks. On this particular issue, however, I think that they have got it wrong for a number of reasons. Everyone in the House wants to see the Irish Republic prosper, but the question is: which is the best way to help it? Its problem is that it is part of the euro. Government Members have always argued that the United Kingdom should not be part of the euro, because it cannot possibly work. It is not possible to have one fixed interest rate and one fixed currency covering a number of different countries. What we are witnessing is a crisis in which that problem has come to light. If Ireland were not part of the eurozone—if it had its own currency—it could change its interest rate, but more importantly, its currency could depreciate, which would make it more expensive for exports to come into Ireland and cheaper for exports to go out. It is a market mechanism for self-righting an economic collapse, and because Ireland is part of the eurozone, it cannot do that. I take the view that in the next few months the euro will collapse. It will not just be Ireland and Greece; it will be Spain, Portugal and possibly Italy. At that stage, it will be necessary to abandon the euro entirely or have two eurozones. If I am right in that assumption, it is a mistake to give £3.25 billion to the Irish at a time when it will do no good at all and that money will never be repaid. If we were paving the way for the Irish to have their own currency again, which would be part of the sterling area, we would be more of a help to Ireland. My argument is that we are sending the money in the wrong direction. The second issue we have—to be fair to the shadow Chancellor, I think he was on to it—is that we do not know how the figure has been arrived at. Nobody has explained—at least, I have not heard anyone do so—why we have settled on £3.25 billion, but I think the Chancellor was arguing that that is the sort of amount we would have had to provide through the European financial stability facility if we had been part of the eurozone. Well, we are not part of the eurozone, so why should we be contributing to something that eurozone countries should be providing on their own?