An Irish solution looms as we bow low to our new masters

FORGET the hysteria surrounding the up-coming visit by Queen Elizabeth — she’s so last empire — our new colonial lords and masters, the EU/IMF troika, are already in town, and how we bow and scrape at their approach.

We are now a politically defaulted republic which can only be reborn through financial default — truly, an Irish solution to an Irish problem.

Ajai Chopra, the viceroy of Ireland in all but name, and his two helpers are essentially here to treat the Government as wayward children by marking their maths homework to make sure the sums finally add up, and check that our notoriously sticky-fingered banking class has not had its grubby hands in the tuck shop till again.