Greek Finance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis has said that Greece and Ireland face parallel pressures from soaring energy prices and volatile bond markets, using a joint appearance with Irish Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Simon Harris to defend Athens' strategy of pairing targeted relief with continued debt reduction.
Speaking at a Fine Gael-organized conference on small business and entrepreneurship in Dublin, Mr. Pierrakakis said energy costs remain the dominant concern across Europe, echoing pressures both countries face on heating oil and fuel prices for households.
He said fiscal and macroeconomic policy must pursue parallel goals — supporting citizens and businesses without destabilizing the macroeconomy, a lesson both nations learned "the hard way" during the 2009-2010 debt crisis.
Mr. Pierrakakis credited this week's back-to-back credit upgrades from Moody's and Scope Ratings to Greece's fiscal discipline, noting public debt peaked near 210% of GDP after the pandemic and is now falling faster than anywhere else in the world, projected at 136.8% this year and below 120% by decade's end.
"We are not going to pass the bill to the next generation," he said, comparing Greece's lost economic output during its crisis — 25 percentage points of GDP — to the scale of the U.S. Great Depression.
Mr. Pierrakakis praised Ireland's EU presidency, particularly Mr. Harris's push on the bloc's Market Integration and Supervision Package, and said Europe must simultaneously advance banking union, capital markets and energy integration rather than sequencing reforms one at a time, calling implementation — not diagnosis — the continent's central challenge.