Power shouldn’t rest with financial markets

ON a recent sojourn to the Continent, I had the dubious pleasure of debating about Ireland’s severe financial woes with the numerous Germans I met.

After initial coldness to my point that Ireland’s economic problems were not all of the state’s own making — namely that those bondholders who gambled on our prosperity must share the burden — my German friends began to see things differently.

There was further convergence of opinion when I compared the Irish Republic’s situation now to that of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and ‘30s, stressing the point that if outside “assistance” is seen as punitive, who knows what that could lead to.