Financial Assistance (Ireland)

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Monday 22nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

I hope my hon. Friend will allow me not to engage in speculation about any other country at the moment. The package today shows the willingness of the international community, the IMF and so on to help countries that get themselves into trouble, whether they are in Europe or anywhere else in the world.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Earlier today, I met politics students from Bede sixth form college in my constituency, who asked how it can be right to bail out the Irish economy, but wrong for our previous Government to have done likewise when our banks posed the same threat to our economy. Has the Chancellor an answer to the students and the House?

[Mr Osborne]

I would say to those students, and, indeed, to the hon. Gentleman, who represents them, that their prospects of getting a job later in their lives depend on a stable UK economy that is growing and a stable Irish economy that is not having contagion effects on the UK or anywhere else. That is why we are taking action domestically to put our own house in order. Even his students, I am sure, would recognise that, in the end, we cannot live beyond our means and we cannot sustain an economy on debt alone. I am also sure that if his students asked themselves what connections they had to Ireland, they would find quite a lot of connections in their family, in the businesses that they know about and the like. Our two economies are interconnected.