So, let's see. If you're Irish, and you suffer a terrible, unprecedented recession and you end up with a serious deficit problem, your public sector workers have huge pay cuts, your taxes rise, and you accept this and tough it out in a good-humoured manner.
If you're German, and you suffer a bad structural competitiveness problem as a consequence of an unprecedented political event (the absorption of East Germany) and problems managing the government's pensions commitments, you endure a decade of economic stagnation and a high pension age. But you tough it out with solid discipline and hard work.
But if you're Greece, and you have been consistently ill-disciplined, lied and defrauded your way into the euro, failed to abide by even the most basic of accounting norms, regularly failed to implement European rules and regulations properly, even to the extent that your courts are not regarded by the top European Courts as properly constituted judicial authorities, run up huge debts that you can't service, and at the height of your problems elected a government that promised to raise spending even more, then because you make a fuss and have strikes and vaguely threaten revolution, you're supposed to be given tens of billions of euros instead of cutting back??
And for being sceptical about doing this, at a time when their economic recovery has stalled, the Germans are seen as the bad guys!?
