Tim Worstall points us to what he accurately calls a doozy: a piece by Professor Morgan Kelly about the appalling plight facing an Ireland now impaled on assorted policy outcomes which lead straight to national disaster. 

It’s readable and unambiguous. Thus:

Honohan’s miscalculation of the bank losses has turned out to be the costliest mistake ever made by an Irish person…

The deal was torpedoed from an unexpected direction. At a conference call with the G7 finance ministers, the haircut was vetoed by US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner who, as his payment of $13 billion from government-owned AIG to Goldman Sachs showed, believes that bankers take priority over taxpayers. The only one to speak up for the Irish was UK chancellor George Osborne, but Geithner, as always, got his way. An instructive, if painful, lesson in the extent of US soft power, and in who our friends really are.

Prof Kelly has a plan:

National survival requires that Ireland walk away from the bailout. This in turn requires the Government to do two things: disengage from the banks, and bring its budget into balance immediately...

This allows Ireland to walk away from the banking system by returning the Nama assets to the banks, and withdrawing its promissory notes in the banks. The ECB can then learn the basic economic truth that if you lend €160 billion to insolvent banks backed by an insolvent state, you are no longer a creditor: you are the owner. At some stage the ECB can take out an eraser and, where “Emergency Loan” is written in the accounts of Irish banks, write “Capital” instead. When it chooses to do so is its problem, not ours...

He makes a trenchant case. But then as one of his commenters puts it:

This course of action requires vision of Franklin Roosevelt, the courage of Winston Churchill and the swashbucking daring of Errol Flynn; we’ve got Enda Kenny, Michael Noonan, and Eamonn Gilmore