[SeanMacConMara]

>they needed the higher-tax countries to bail them out just a few years ago:

You have that the wrong way around.

The Irish taxpayers, unwillingly, covered the massive gambling losses of private individuals and companies(including a group of businesses called "banks") who were playing in the (German-lead US-style) light-touch bank de-regulation "bank-casinos" of Europe. The "casinos" in Ireland had a disproportionate share of that action at approx 40% of the EU total.

The total cost to the Irish tax-payer was approx 65 billion euro I've heard.

We bailed them out using money we _borrowed_ from them and have paid back in full (recently i think?) with interest.

Thats like borrowing money from your loan shark to cover his poker losses.

[IAmEveryone]

I usually don't engage in this sort of trivial nationalism. But I just have to inject that your retelling of this story omits the fact that Irish banks were obviously first in line to go belly-up.

It is true that those banks had various lenders in Germany/France/wherever, and that the consequences of an all-out collapse of the Irish economy would have had negative effects in those countries as well.

But presenting it as some sort of altruistic sacrifice to allow them to rescue Ireland from a potato-based future is just adding moral bankruptcy to the other.

[SeanMacConMara]

a few points

Thanks

Nothing about this is trivial.

This is not nationalism. There should be no pride in our creation or solution to our portion of this moronic mess.

The obvious was ommitted because it was obvious. The banks are only "Irish" in a nominal sense. The people or state as a whole didn't own them. Don't forget they are international commerical businesses and can and should be shut down when they fail like any other business.

Obviously they are a critical piece of modern infrastructure and there was already plans in place for their failure such as "deposit protection insurance" schemes etc. The big question is if those plans were/are robust enough in modern countries. We _all_ need to be able to confidentaly able to "cull" bad components of our modern infrastructure without fear of causing wider problems.

Nothing about it was altruistic. Fear and panic very obviously gripped the politicians involved on all sides.

As an interesting related historic aside, we survived reasonably well without our banks for 6 months previously when we were a much weaker economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_bank_strikes_%281966%E2%...

[pjc50]

Quite a lot of that was down to AIB, Sean FitzPatrick and Sean Quinn; at the height of the property boom there was all sorts of extraordinary conduct going on. Much of it on property loans within Ireland to other Irish companies.