Updated 6.08pm

MEP BRIAN HAYES has said Ireland needs to rethink it’s attitude towards the European Union and the assistance it provided in recent years.

“We’ve listened for quite some time to this rather nauseating narrative that in some ways Europe is responsible for all our problems,” the Fine Gael/EPP politician told EuroParlRadio.

“The truth of the matter is that our problems are home grown,” Hayes said, referencing the budget deficit.

He said the bailout didn’t bankrupt Ireland, but the country was already in that situation.

He also hit out at opposition parties, saying that if Ireland had ‘followed the advice of Mr Adams and Mr Higgins, and all the other ginger-left groups, our country would go the way of Argentina”.

I think we need to have an honest debate rather than this kinda ‘attacking Johnny Foreigner’, UKIP, Au Francais National, Sinn Féin position.

Au Francais National was presumably a reference to the National Front in France.

However, Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan has hit back at Hayes, accusing him of ‘losing the run of himself since he moved to Brussels’.

“Sinn Féin has never excused the fact that the domestic economic policies of Fianna Fáil fed into the economic crises,” she said.

“We flagged that the continued reliance on the housing market was unsustainable. ”

However, that does not absolve the ECB and the EU Commission for their role in both creating the economic crises and then post-crash, heaping the burden on those least able to pay. We are not going to apologise to anybody for highlighting this in Europe.

In a separate statement today, Hayes called the ECB’s refusal to attend the Banking Inquiry as  ”a grave disappointment”.

“I’ve questioned President Mario Draghi on this matter on two separate occasions in the last four months,” he said.

On each occasion I was left with a clear impression that the ECB were looking at ways to engage with the Irish banking inquiry.

The ECB has told the Inquiry that it does not answer to national governments.

Originally published 10.36am

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