The two-day visit of France's Prime Minister Manuel Valls to Ireland is an important and welcome reaffirmation of the friendship between our two countries and the strength of French-Irish relations, notably in the EU context. On central community issues like agriculture and regional policy the two states have traditionally marched in step, and we have important common interests in the management of the euro and the evolution of economic governance in the union that will be at the core of discussions today between Mr Valls and Taoiseach Enda Kenny.
There is a largely unstated uneasiness in Dublin about the EU's agreement to allow France more time to reduce its deficit – if everyone else has to abide by the budget rules, the argument goes, some at painful cost, is there an element of exceptionalism for France, "big boys's rules" that smaller states fear are all too often a default position in the EU? Are the concessions to France not simply an invitation to postpone necessary economic reform?
But Mr Valls’s argument, that the EU must not allow overzealous fiscal rectitude to stall a recovery that is underway will chime with political sentiment here that insists that the EU must move on from its crisis/austerity mode to one more more conducive to job creation and expansion. “We will respect our commitment to reduce the structural deficit,” he told our correspondent Lara Marlowe, “but not to the detriment of growth.”
In the wake of yesterday’s summit on the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, the two leaders will certainly discuss the politically difficult issue of “burden-sharing” and the EU’s limited response. And Greece’s debt crisis will certainly feature.
The French are also investing major diplomatic effort which Mr Valls will outline in preparing their hosting in December of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in an ambitious bid to achieve , for the first time in over 20 years of UN negotiations, a binding and universal agreement on climate from all the nations of the world.