Gates of hell are not closed yet

As he looked out on the snow at Brussels airport after a crisis meeting in Nov 2010, then finance minister Brian Lenihan sat alone and concluded: “Hell is at the gates.”

Within days, those gates burst open and the all-consuming economic firestorm that followed saw Ireland’s financial sovereignty disappear in the ashes, and the collapsing Fianna Fáil/Green government burn on a funeral pyre of its own making.

Lenihan later spoke of the “betrayal” of the ECB and the way it had “forced” Ireland into such a situation, but the reality was that the country’s financial system had been left exposed to a near calamitous extent by the mammoth incompetence of a government that was left with no option but to agree to the surrender terms dictated by the EU/ECB/IMF troika.