Dude, can I politely ask you to increase the amount of commas and periods you use? Otherwise you're really hard to follow :)

> everyone else is mostly still locked within their own countries

That's not really the case. In fact, in a lot of sectors purely-national players are now the exception, not the rule. You have Portuguese building companies winning UK contracts, and French companies outsourcing to Czech companies. All that wouldn't be possible if richer countries could just lock down their markets with state subsidies. In fact, the only market where this does not happen is agriculture, which is heavily regulated and planned at the EU level.

You keep reasoning on national terms, whereas the point of the EU is to overcome those terms.

> The German taxpayer isn't really picking up the bill

The numbers respectfully disagree: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8036097.stm#start

> Because of how the Euroblock/ECB is structured most of the normal debt relief tools that would be available to a "normal" country are not available to Ireland

Not just to Ireland, to anyone. Which is really the main problem with the Euro, to be honest. There are solutions, but they need a coordinated effort by Eurozone countries to overcome German diffidence towards potentially weakening the currency. This effort is slowly building, now that France and Italy have nothing left to lose.

> they are trying to have the cake and eat it

Well, it's what everyone wants, isn't it? :)

> they have a shared currency and a monetary policy that is dictated by an external body the ECB which to be fair no one really elects

FED heads are also not elected but rather nominated; and historically they are pretty independent as well. Politically, the ECB is under a similar amount of pressure; the Governing Board is nominated by the European Council, aka national governments, and include representatives from all countries; on top of that sits a restricted Executive team which traditionally includes at least one German, one French and one Italian, recognising the larger role of their economies.

> the Irish government can't do squat

The Irish government can apply political pressure much like the governor of Alabama; the difference is that, lacking an electoral lighting rod, nobody cares too much about Alabama here. If there were such a lighting rod (a powerful elected EU President with executive powers), countries would cry about loss of sovereignty. EU economists are not the only ones wanting to eat cake, it appears :)

> The EU/Euroblock will soon figure out that they'll have to go either to a fully or at least much more federated system

Absolutely. Fiscal harmonisation is the next step on that path, and this decision is coherent with that endgame.

> India... South Africa...

Neither of those has unfettered access to the largest market on the planet. I should have probably qualified my previous statement with something like "in the EU".

> Germany would be considerably better and cheaper to operate in

You're selling Ireland short, here. Tax is one element of policy, but not the only one. I'm pretty sure US companies would rather work with Irish unions than German ones, for example. Germany is also another hour away in timezone terms, two hours in flight terms, and more uncomfortable to access by sea. And of course, everyone suffers from competition from up-and-coming countries in the same way.