 I'm very happy to be here because I have been only to Dublin once in two or three with Jill, organizing a conference in two or three together with the German Marshal Fund, and we already, you remember, we tried to explain to the Americans the project of the European Constitution. Tells you something, okay. So seven years later, what project do we explain to whom? And I think I should also say I have no speech for you, not a speech on the usual sense that I'm here to sort of present because I'm more here to capture your feelings about what might be your opinion on Germany or your opinions on the European discussion at large. I can try to give you a sense of what I think my country is heading for, but only a feeling because despite what every introduction says, but you know, I have no mandate. I am not elected. I have no power, right? So I'm just trying to feel a little bit of public discussion with some papers, I think was the last one in a way I hit a nerve. I'm not the only one saying what I say. It's probably just a nice summary of what many people say and think, but I wrote it down and this is it, not more. And I think this is also important to understand. And what you also should know is that Derek Scali is my best friend, so you brief me. The real question is really when I was taking my plane this morning, trying to say, okay, the paper you can read, but what I'm going to use my 20 minutes for to really speak about. And then there is always this question sort of on which note do I leave you, right? Half full or half empty? And to be very honest, this morning I wouldn't know any longer. I just wouldn't. And there are some which feed into the half full, right? The Greek voted yes yesterday, and that is at least sort of something that will probably bring us over the summer. Because the Greek voted yes yesterday, the new council will probably just do a sort of roll over in the way we are expecting it. German and French industrials who probably have seen it signed a big sort of advertising thing in major newspapers, which is finally that German industries is waking up to the sort of there's something happening, it may affect me thing. So this is rather good. And I felt like, yeah, okay, this will bring us over the summer. We can all take a brief. We can all go at the beach and then think about what we do when we will back to the movie in September. Because I do actually think we will back to the movie in September because there will be an exchange to be given to Greek. We will also have a very difficult discussion in Germany, which the parliament's for by this sort of parliamentary voting thing which needs to be in a legal sense to be fine tuned and to still to be walked through a legal process. And I'm told by colleagues in the Bundestag that this is really tricky the way you fix it in a little sense, right? And also the ESM is not ratified. We expect cards for to vote over all the planes from last year. So I wouldn't stand here and say there aren't any hurdles to expect. And if now this trend to Greece is there and Greek has voted about this program, then it's sort of fine, you know, that's not what I'm saying. But I tried to give you some drops to make this glass half full or to least say, yeah, well, we can take a breeze and start thinking about more creatively how we fix it then. But then you lean back and what's my story? I think my story is more an emotional story about where a country stands and what you try to detect from newspapers reading. And if you screen who writes what in which newspaper and who has a majority in, you know, which argument buys and which argument doesn't sell. And I'm a true believer in tipping points, right? And I feel honestly that sometimes you can miss a window of opportunity and debates can turn sour and it's not so easy to bring them back to what there should be. So I guess my talk here is much about a total amalgam about many discussions that we haven't all been able to disentangle and that goes from lazy Greeks to cheating Greece to a much more profound problem of primacy of politics over financial markets that goes from how we organize our democracy in Europe to legitimacy question, like Jung Habermas rises them in our book. So what I'm saying is that when discussions get complex, the easy arguments sell better, right? And this happened in Germany, of course. And the easy argument was we did the job, we restructured our economy. Yes, we did, right? We did, and the others did not. So we are the best and the others should do what we did. And that was the easy part of it. The Greeks are lazy in the first place. By the way, because I'm talking to an Irish audience, but everybody in Germany can make a difference between Greece and Ireland, right? I'm talking more about Greece because it's more what the German, that's perhaps interesting to know for an Irish audience. We are not going to sleep with concerns about Ireland, right? We know that this country is profoundly sane, healthy, has a young dynamic that grows, can, you know, that... Confederation? Then there is... Sometimes we worry. That there's a debt problem, that we will need to fix it, that we will need to talk about interest rates, 5% lesser higher, that there's a corporate tax issue, which can be solved because you are reasonable, the Germans are reasonable, yeah? But the irrationality, the newspaper irrationality or the so-called published opinion about Greek, Ireland, Portugal is pretty different from Ireland to Greece to Portugal, right? And I want you to know this. I think nobody in Germany goes too bad, sort of we have a real problem with the Irish. We have many technical problems with the Irish and we all know in a way that can be solved if collective wisdom is there and if collective wisdom is put into place. The real question is, will there be ultimately enough political energy to put that into place if other debates are so irrational and drive us all nuts before we can come to solving the little Irish question, right? And that is why I allow, under the auspices of the German Foreign Service, to speak much more about emotions than about figures, right? I checked up a little of your figures and about what you need to have, a surplus and, yeah, but you all know this so I don't need to talk with you about this. Going back to Germany, and I was talking about tipping points, right? If my thesis, my philic, is right, that since a year what I would call wrong arguments have been puring the German debate and the wrong arguments at all about we are the victims of the whole thing, we are paying for everybody, we are backing everybody, you know, everybody is cheating us and there's something like a trust relationship broken between the Germans and Europe because the European Union is no longer what they think they shaped in the first place, bailout 125 sort of, you know, law and order, German rule, principles. And this breakdown of trust, I think, is very important for public mindset because trust is what makes a relationship happening. By the way, private like collective relationships. If you can't trust, then you can't trust. And if you can't trust, you need to control it, right? And I think this is happening. And this has been happening in large extent. So, then, and that was the beginning. You all know that Biltzaiton carried this out and ruled this out first the Greeks, then the Irish. And why did it happen? And what is of concern for me is why did German elites not go against? You know, that was the appell of Jürgen Habermas a year ago. Deutsche Eliten rettet Europa. German elites, please save Europe, right? Here's the interesting point when I talk about tipping points. Who is writing the pro argument, we should take this as a collective problem and solve it. It's basically Helmut Schmidt, 82 years old, Jürgen Habermas, 82 years old, Joschka Fischer, 60 something years old, and sometimes little Giro, 46, right? There are another handful of people, but there are not many, right? And there's something like an obsession of a mainstream economic discourse, which clearly stands beyond the international economic discourse. It's sort of as if Germany has to a large extent an autistic debate, not that arguments from the outside do not peer into the German media system, and arguments from the German media system don't peer outside or don't drop outside. What I see here, I mean, for instance, I guess you read the Financial Times and then you read Martin Wolf or you read Wolfgang Münchau, right? Wolfgang Münchau is perceived as being more or less anti-German, more like a bastard, right? So the Münchau argument, that is the argument about trade imbalances and Germany is perhaps part of the problem, not only the solution sort of argument, yeah? It's just not perceived in mainstream media, yes, but not related to the Deutsches Bildungsbürgertum, so that I get a broader understanding of the crisis. The effort set is not a relay for Wolfgang Münchau. I guess that's what I'm trying to tell you, right? So you need to imagine that if you're barfing, imagine, and I'm just trying to depict what happened with German elites, imagine that the German elites are the pharmacist and the doctor and all these Bildungsbürgertum who is more or less feeded through the effort set on how Germany should behave, right? If a newspaper like this doesn't hold against an anti-European spin in public opinion, then you lose your elites. So the build site is one thing, which is bottom up, but the effort set was top down and they did it too. The effort set also wrote Germany into northern Europe, currency, European and southern currency, union, all of it. They are basically, since a couple of weeks, and I give you that one, they are trying to withdraw from it, and you see neat differences between politic, economic and spiritual section, which is interesting because what I detect here is that the effort set, if it all implodes, does not want to be all responsible for being a bad media player, but that's a different discussion. All this, to just explain to you the following things, which is we have a complete amalgam in the discussion, the German readiness to see ourselves as part into the responsibility reckless lending in these arguments, not present in the mainstream discussion, a very narrow-minded economic discourse which is impermeable from the outside, and this feeds public opinion, of course, or it is a gate opener to populist tendencies, of course. To that, you add a completely changed, and I developed this all in my paper, you add a completely changed German Bundestag that has seen the biggest rotation in the last elections where the last people who had been mandates before 89, so sort of institutional knowledge about what Germany has been and what the German-European narrative has once been before 89, say the Schäuble narrative, right? You have 60 persons left in the Bundestag who have been doing deputies before 89. So it's a huge rotation, and the most youngest part is the Liberals, which interestingly love other less European party in the system now. I don't say this to blame anybody, and I'm not blaming my country. I just want to say that this country has profoundly changed and that we have lost the narrative, and the narrative is like, you know, Voltaire incondite, you know, it for cultivé sans jardin, and we didn't cultivé notre jardin, right? So somebody needs to rouse the flowers, and I am of a generation where I thought it's done. 92 done. Maastricht dry, in trocknen Tücher, you know, in dry finished. No, it's not. And so the amalgam of, I would argue all innocent tendencies, nothing there is a master plan, and that is my assessment. There's not nasty Merkel out there who tries to whine Germany out of Europe. There's no blind industry who's running behind China. It's not a master concept here that Germany wants to behave differently, or I feel like there's just something like historical gravity coming and that comes from many things at a time. It comes from bottom up this, you know, innocent nationalism things like soccer game winning and Lena Song Contest things, which are important, German flags since 206, never seen in my life before, right? Innocent bottom up, right? You add to that a complete complexity of internationalisation, globalisation, who does a difference whether we lose jobs to the Czech Republic or to China. I mean, probably not my mother, right? So is Europe a fortress? Is it not? Can it defend? Does Europe add to that? Who knows? Can we disentangle that discussion? Can we make the case for Europe in that discussion? We cannot. You add to that the whole change of the political establishment and you add to that the very fact that Germany is finding a sovereign country. And we have the inverse tendency of what we had in the past, which is that foreign policy was basically driving our domestic discussions from Wieder-Bewafner 55 to Euro Missiles 83 to the Euro question 82 and just with Kohl, just Schmidt-Kohl, I don't know Schmidt-Kohl, everybody running it because foreign policy structured our domestic discussions. Now it's the inverse. Domestic policy structures our foreign policy decisions and that is what you have seen. Karlsruhe, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Baden-Württemberg, I had an Estonian journalist on 10th of May who called me sort of, what the hell is northern risk failure? And I felt, okay, does not look so evident and you're sitting in the Baltic countries, okay? So, but this is, I think, what changed in Germany. And again, I think nothing of this is nasty. Nothing of this is, I think it's more by default than by strategy, which is the pity in itself, but still it's more by default than a strategy. And if anybody is to blame, perhaps a strategy, a government for lacking strategy, you may blame a government for that, but German citizens are not to blame. The non-elite citizens. Because I think what is in this problematic constellations of completely reversed victims discussions, the Irish as being a victims and the Greeks being a victims, but the Germans a victim too, right? So we're all a victim of Europe, which is a little bit crazy. I argue, and I know that this is a very dangerous argument because apparently it's not so easy to do econometric simulations to demonstrate this in the figures, yeah? But my God's feeling, sort of numberless, that there is a point to make that the wealth, the collective wealth that Germany had through Europe, single market and Euro, has not or has been unevenly distributed in the domestic wealth distribution. Which means that not everybody profited in the same way from Europe. And this is why Germany is now losing middle classes for the political project of Europe, right? We had 10, 15 years where if you are not an export driven worker or a worker in an export driven company like BMW, Siemens and so on and so forth, you have rather relative losses in salary than gains. So how do I explain to these people that they are winner of a single market? So the perception is wrong from the outside. Germany's seen the bold exporter, China and Bruderler told it all over the place, you know, that's the wrong discussion I feel from Germany. We are both so strong and economic miracle number two, right? From the inside, Germany is poorer and more fragile than at any time in history that I have lived in this country. We have erosion in the east. You have poor and empty regions in the east. You have sometimes 30% unemployment in the former GDR. You have towns that die in the western part where I come from, we have this whole demography, you know, so this perspective that we are just about export China giant Germany which is a thing that we conveyed is not true. Not true for the ordinary German. And therefore you can catch him very easily on why should he pay for Greece and not for German kids, for instance, right? I had this. Every third day I'm on TV in Germany and the questions I get most is why do we pay for Greece and not for the education of our children, these sort of things. Is it normal? Is it understandable? Probably it is. So I guess I stop here. If we conclude, I think it's much about, I honestly think this crisis can be fixed. It can. Cost a lot of money, 13 billion for Germany. We can talk soft restructuring, real restructuring, who does what, when, how we manage it. But I was sitting in a conference of 50 experts from banks, among them Klaus Regling and who have you. And there were 50 people who know more than I and who basically said everybody, it can be, we have this, we know how to fix it. The Irish and the Greek and the poor, that's not the problem. We need to bring it from techniques to politics. We need to find the political mindset that allows us to find, to apply the technical solutions which are on the table. And for that we need to shape a discourse. And that is what I'm here for, to give you a little help to understand the German discourse, to give me some help to better understand the Irish discourse. And then Derek and I, we will try to work. Okay.