No more heavy lifting — give us the €40bn

A weekend of back-slapping has just passed as Michael Noonan and his fellow ministers clap each other on the back at his success in getting the boys in Europe to let Ireland pay back the money its predecessor borrowed from the IMF.

Mr Noonan agreed in advance that none of the others had anything to lose by agreeing. Why then the self-congratulations? Given that the IMF loan was at 5% or so and money could now be borrowed at around 2%, replacing IMF money with cheaper money was a no brainer.

The fear that many of us had last week when we listened to the hype of Michael’s whistlestop trip to the hotspots of Europe to get agreement from the main players, was that a win here could somehow come back to bite us on the proverbials. We were specifically concerned that we were set to lose any chance we had of getting any meaningful return on the €64bn we, the taxpayers, stumped up to bailout rotten banks, greedy developers, ineffective politicians, incompetent regulators and, of course, the big foreign bond holders. After all, Europe had “promised” some two years ago that we were in for some recovery of the money the Irish taxpayer paid over to rescue the euro from near collapse. We had been led to believe by Enda, Michael and the lads that they would do whatever it took to get Europe to stump up this money. We should never forget that by rolling over, letting the bond holders, aka gamblers, walk free with unjustified winnings courtesy of the taxpayer, we took one for the team. That bailing the banks out cost us north of €40bn (the net figure after bank fees and sale of bank assets). Unfortunately, it looks like we were right to worry.