EU’s knee-jerk return to national business subsidies could distort the single market in favour of larger states
Ireland’s economic success over the past 50 years of European Union membership has been based on free trade with EU member states and across the wider world. Our home market is too small to reap economies of scale, so Ireland needs to trade with the wider world. This will mean higher prices for motorists, and more greenhouse gas emissions, given the higher cost of going electric. As we don’t have a domestic car industry, it is easier for us to make this case.
For more than 30 years a core tenet of EU economic policy has been to ban government subsidies to individual businesses, to create a level playing field.