MINISTER FOR Finance Michael Noonan has robustly defended his “feta cheese” remark about trade with Greece, which was described by former Greek prime minister George Papandreou as “simplistic” and “flippant”.
Speaking at a Bloomberg conference last week, Mr Noonan suggested Irish consumers putting feta cheese into their shopping baskets was the extent of trade with Greece. He asked: “If you go into the shops here when you’re doing your weekly shopping, apart from feta cheese, how many Greek items do you put in your basket?”
Yesterday, Mr Noonan said international listeners to the online broadcast of the conference might not have understood the Irish position and tended to put International Monetary Fund programme states such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal “in the one box”.
In answer to a question on whether contagion would spread from Greece to Ireland, he sought to stress there was little economic, trade or banking connections between the two states. “I could have done that by running a bunch of statistics, but I thought it was better communication to refer to the basket,” he told RTÉ Radio One’s This Week programme.
Asked whether he agreed the remarks could be construed as “flippant” and “simplistic”, Mr Noonan said: “If that was the way RTÉ briefed Mr Papandreou, he would have got that position.” Mr Papandreou had not understood the context in which he was speaking, he said.
Earlier in the programme, Mr Papandreou said attempting to deal with Europe’s problems “through stereotypes” would not work. He said he believed there was trade of up to €300 million between the two countries.
“If we end up being so simplistic and sometimes flippant, we start accusing each other and stereotyping each other. This I think has undermined European solidarity but also what Europe stands for,” Mr Papandreou said.
Mr Noonan said less than half a per cent of Ireland’s total exports went to Greece, and imports from Greece represented less than one-tenth of 1 per cent of the total.
He had supported Greece’s continuation in the euro zone. At a recent Euro Group meeting he was so supportive of the Greek position that the Greek minister for finance and his chief civil servant came to thank him personally afterwards, Mr Noonan said.
