Catch 22 for Irish abortion law - navigating Ireland’s rigid, Catholic influence legal framework and Savita Halappanavar’s case

Savita Halappanavar’s husband Praveen speaks to the 
media last Friday after the inquest into his wife’s death concluded.

The inquest into the death of Savita Halappanavar did not blame anyone for her death.  Despite all we have heard over the past two weeks, no one is to be held accountable.

Even the hospital is not to be blamed, despite the admission of the consultant (senior doctor) involved in Savita's care that her death was due to a "systems failure" in her treatment in hospital (mainly due to poor communication and mistakes).  Instead the main finding of the inquest is that Savita died of "medical misadventure."

It's an antiquated term, like much of the law and the terminology relating to inquests.  In plain man's language it's like saying that something was an accident, a happening for which no one is responsible. It even carries the suggestion of an element of bad luck.  

Misadventure -- a sort of accident due to bad luck. It's an interesting legal term.  

It's also a totally inadequate term to describe the appalling combination of Catholic-inspired law, medical incompetence, mistakes by hospital staff, inadequate record keeping, poor communication and failure to care that resulted in Savita's death.

But it would be a mistake to blame the coroner who conducted the hearings for the unsatisfactory nature of the main finding of the inquest.

An inquest in not a criminal court.  It is confined by legislation to establishing the cause of a death. That is its sole function, and it is specifically excluded from finding anyone guilty or even of apportioning blame.

In this case there is general agreement that the coroner did an excellent job in making public for the first time the circumstances and the causes of Savita's death.  It may not be the complete picture, given the limitations of a coroner's court and fact that one key witness did not give evidence.

But it has given us a great deal of detail about what happened, detail that has shocked the country and punched a large hole in the credibility of our claims about having one of the best maternity hospital systems in the world.

What emerged during the six days of the inquest over the past two weeks was really frightening.  A tragedy of errors, Savita's care was a shameful sequence of failure to diagnose what was happening to her, of poor or inadequate treatment, of sloppy medical records and failure to read notes, of failure to communicate between staff, of delayed testing and so on.

Above all, it exposed the refusal of the hospital to allow her a termination until it was too late.

It started right at the beginning.  She went to the hospital on the Sunday in pain, probably in the early stages of miscarriage, but this was not diagnosed and she was sent home again.  In more severe pain, she returned a few hours later, was admitted and was found to be miscarrying.

It was established that her membranes had ruptured (leaving her open to infection) and that there was very little chance of the baby surviving (she was 17 weeks pregnant).

Still in pain and instinctively feeling that she was not well, on Monday and Tuesday she asked for a termination. Her consultant explained that the law prohibited a termination because there was still a fetal heartbeat present.  A midwife explained that this was because "Ireland is a Catholic country," the remark that made news around the world.  

There were failures to notice changes in her blood cell counts, indicating sepsis (blood poisoning). Incredibly, when she began to shiver violently (a clear indication of the onset of blood poisoning) she was given a paracetamol pain tablet and a blanket.

By the time she was diagnosed, on the Wednesday, the sepsis was already advanced.  Her consultant, who had delayed a termination because she was awaiting the fetal heartbeat to stop and for the results of a blood test that had gone astray, finally agreed to intervene.

Savita was taken to surgery but she delivered spontaneously and the fetus was already dead.  But by then it was too late.  She was in septic shock, her organs had begun to fail and intensive care failed to save her.

Some of the details of the story were truly shocking, particularly the symptoms that were missed by nurses, doctors and the consultant, for example the falling blood-pressure readings that the nurses saw and noted but did not communicate to a doctor, the inadequate antibiotics Savita was given even when it was realized she was seriously ill, the failure of one doctor to tell the consultant about a discharge that would have prompted earlier intervention, and so on.  

Most shocking of all, of course, was the refusal to give Savita the termination she requested.  That is the fundamental point in all of this.

Aware that her fetus would not survive, in pain and sensing that her body was not feeling right, Savita requested a termination.  If she had been granted a woman's right to choose, this one fact transcends all the arguments.  If she had been allowed to choose, she would be alive today.

You will be aware that the legal situation here on abortion depends on a Supreme Court decision in the 1980s (after the X-case) which upheld the equal right to life of the mother and the unborn, but said that abortion is permissible when there is "a real and substantial risk to the life" of a woman instead of just to her health.

The Supreme Court implied that it was up to the Dail (Parliament) to legislate for the detail of this, but our gutless politicians never did.  The Irish Medical Council issued guidelines for doctors, but these did not go much further than the Supreme Court phrase about "a real and substantial risk" to the life of the woman.

Basically individual doctors were left by themselves to interpret what this meant in day-to-day situations.  And since the vast majority of Irish women who want an abortion go to the U.K. to get one (at least 4,000 a year) this was not a huge problem.

Except in crisis situations.  In these situations, the fact that we do not have abortion in Ireland can be deadly, as we have seen in the case of Savita.

The present government has promised to take action.   Proposed legislation is supposed to come before the Cabinet this week.  But there are already signs of deep divisions between and within the coalition parties on the issue.

The Savita case may yet change Ireland. But it unlikely to change it very much. All the signs are that when (or if) we do get abortion here it is likely to be extremely restrictive. Whether it will prevent another Savita happening remains to be seen.

The most senior doctor to give evidence at the inquest, the head of one of the biggest maternity hospitals in the country, said that under the present legal framework Savita could not be given a termination on the Monday and Tuesday.  By the time she could be given one, on the Wednesday, it was too late to save her because the sepsis was too advanced.  It's the deadly Catch-22 of Irish abortion legislation.

How do you measure what is a "substantial" risk.  How serious does it have to be before it qualifies as substantial? And how much right has a woman to decide how much risk she wants to take?

In Ireland, a woman has no such right.  She has to lie there while the legal framework inspired by a lot of Catholic celibate males takes its course.

As Praveen, Savita's husband, said after the inquest, if she had known how rigid our system is she would have jumped out of bed and run from the hospital.

The late Baroness Margaret Thatcher had her good points

Last Friday, a book of condolence was opened at the British 
Embassy in Dublin in memory of the late Margaret Thatcher. 

There were two big stories here last week.

First, there was the seven year extension Ireland was given in the schedule for paying back its bailout loans.

This was very good news, although the "breakthrough" for the government was spoiled somewhat when the former top International Monetary Fund official involved in our bailout admitted that the rescue plan for Ireland, with no bondholders being burned and the country being crushed by austerity cutbacks, had been a bad deal for us from the very beginning.  

The second big story was the ongoing inquest into the death of Savita Halappanavar, the pregnant Indian woman who died in a Galway hospital last year of blood poisoning after being refused a termination even though she was miscarrying and the fetus had very little chance of survival.  The evidence last week revealed mistakes and incompetence, and also exposed the possible deadly effect of our Catholic-inspired law in such cases.  

We will be coming back to both these important stories in this column in the coming weeks.  But this week it is right and proper that we mark the passing of Margaret Thatcher, particularly in view of the misguided and badly informed reaction in some quarters to her death.  Her funeral is taking place in London this week.  

Thatcher was an extremely divisive politician and was badly wrong in some of the decisions she made as British prime minister.  But she was not an evil witch whose death should be celebrated, as it shamefully was in parts of Britain and Ireland in the past week.

I was not an admirer of Thatcher.  She dogged a large part of my career, as she did that of many journalists of my generation.  (We always seemed to be writing headlines with Out! Out! Out! in them.)

But at least I was there when she was in Downing Street.  A lot of those comparing her to Hitler or Stalin last week -- comparisons which are ridiculous -- were in junior school at the time.

She will always be remembered in Ireland, of course, for the hunger strikes and the inflexibility that led to the deaths of Bobby Sands and those who followed him.

At the time l was assistant editor of the Irish Press, and I remember well the long nights when we waited until the small hours of the morning before printing the paper because we knew that another hunger striker in the H-Blocks in the Maze prison was at death's door.  

It was tragic, macabre and also frustrating because lives were being lost on a point of principle.  They wanted to be recognized as political prisoners with the right to wear their own clothes instead of prison clothes.  She was determined that they be treated as criminals and wear normal prison clothing.

Looking back now, it may seem extraordinary that this symbolic issue led to horrific deaths.   But the symbolism involved, the point of principle, was vitally important to both the men "on the blanket" (because they would not wear prison clothes) and to Thatcher. 
In the south, of course, we had a more pragmatic attitude to the issue.  Republican prisoners locked up down here were allowed to wear whatever they liked as long as did not cause any trouble!  

Was Thatcher right to be so inflexible on this? Probably not.  

But she was inflexible about everything, which is why she was called the Iron Lady.  And having taken such a public stance on the issue she would not retreat, at least not at the start.

The death of Sands and the nine other hunger strikers in a gruesome sequence that went on for weeks and weeks made her a figure of unrestrained hatred in Ireland, and elsewhere.  She became -- and remained -- the ultimate hate figure for Republicans, as we have seen from their reaction to her death in the past week.

But the reality is far more nuanced than today's Republican and/or Sinn Fein leaders like to remember.

For a start we now know that before the last three hunger strikers died Thatcher was willing to compromise, but the IRA leadership outside the prison would not agree because by then they realized the enormous electoral boost Sinn Fein would get from the deaths.  

The evidence for this came later from Maze chaplain Father Denis Faul among others, including a senior Republican who was in the H-Blocks at the time.  There has been some argument about the details of the deal, but there is no denying that a deal was on offer and was turned down by the IRA outside the prison.  So maybe Thatcher was not the only devil of inflexibility involved.

Not that you would have thought that listening to Gerry Adams last week talking mournfully about all the "hurt" that Mrs. Thatcher had brought to the people of the North and elsewhere.

Gerry and some of his old buddies know all about "hurt" -- just ask the children of Jean McConville or hundreds of other innocents.

In fact Thatcher was as flexible and engaged on Ireland as other British prime ministers before and after her, in spite of her Iron Lady posturing.

She allowed back channel talks with the IRA, in spite of the 1979 murder of her friend Airey Neave, a senior Tory politician, and the Brighton bombing in 1984 which almost killed her and her Cabinet.
In spite of that outrage she remained calm and balanced in her approach to the Irish question.

In spite of publicly humiliating then Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Garret FitzGerald with her dismissal of the Irish options for the North with her Out! Out! Out! press conference, she went on to sign the Anglo Irish Agreement with him in 1985, just a year after Brighton.  That was the bedrock for everything that followed, giving the south a say on what happened in the North, and it eventually led to peace.   She may have talked tough, but she got things done on the Irish question.

Outside Ireland, she is remembered most for the Falklands War.  It was also ridiculous, and deadly of course.

What she should have done was faced up to the colonial absurdity of the situation, negotiated an interim deal with the Argentineans and re-homed any islanders who were not happy in the U.K.

The Americans were willing to broker talks.  But the Argentinean Junta had jumped the gun and invaded.

It's worth remembering that both the UN Security Council and the European Union (then the EEC) had condemned the invasion by the Argentineans.  The then Taoiseach Charlie Haughey tried to distance Ireland from the situation, but there was little sympathy internationally for the Argentinean dictators.

At home in Britain, Thatcher became famous as the prime minister who broke the power of the trade unions which in the late 1960s and 1970s had a stranglehold on the British economy.

Archaic work place rules and demarcation (who does what) enforced by the unions had made Britain highly inefficient, with poor productivity. This was true not just in the massive nationalized part of the British economy but in much of private industry as well.

By the 1970s I was in journalism, and to us in the newspaper industry it was a nightmare as the print unions fought new technology and protected the huge pay packets of some workers who did very little work.

Of course we all claimed to hate Thatcher, but very often she was right.  And she certainly was right about the need to rebalance the power structure in Britain away from the unions.          

With her coiffed hair, immaculate dress and upper class voice, it was easy to make fun of her as a Tory toff.  But of course she wasn't a toff at all.  She was a corner store grocer's daughter who was bright and who worked her way up.  

And it was that background of practicality, hard work, attention to detail and self-reliance that formed her.  She had no time for slackers, and she passionately believed that people must earn their own way rather than always rely on the state.  

She admired the free market, and in her 11 years as prime minister she turned Britain in that direction. She had the courage to state her beliefs and fight for them   Above all, she was dogged in the pursuit of her aims (the lady's not for turning).

Calling her the inflexible Iron Lady misses the point.  She was simplistic in her approach rather than inflexible, not always an advantage when dealing with complex issues.  But at least it was always clear what she wanted.

Sadly, we can't say the same for today's leaders, either in Britain or anywhere else.

Letters from the tax man - the mounting cost of Ireland's property tax and running the country

A man puts up a poster outside Leinster House in Dublin, to promote anti-property tax protest
in Dublin city center

On most mornings over the past month in homes all over Ireland, there has been the barely audible sound of a letter or two plopping into the letterbox or down on the doormat.

Pestered as we all are by junk mail and bills of all kinds, particularly soaring energy bills, most of us don't exactly rush to pick up our post these days. 

But for the past month it's been different.  Because over the past four weeks the Revenue here have been sending out their property tax letters to every home in the country.

As we all know, there are only two things in life that cannot be escaped -- death and taxes.   So it has been with a heavy heart and a sense of foreboding that we have all had our ears strained each morning for the faint sound of the mail arriving.  

Then there is the quick flick through the junk mail, with eyes peeled for the letter with the telltale Revenue type in the corner.

The mail blizzard from the Revenue started on March 11 and by the end of the month, over one million letters had been sent out.   By now, I would guess that most of the 1.6 million homes in the country have had their letters.

Last week it was my turn, and I did what everyone else has done, ripping open the envelope and scanning the letter quickly with fluttering heart and dry mouth to see what the amount I owe is.

Now I know that people in America and most other developed countries are well used to property tax.  But it's all new to us here, or certainly to anyone under the age of around 60.  

Back in 1977 the local property tax that we had here was abolished by the Fianna Fail government as an election gimmick, resulting in a famous landslide victory for them.   And ever since then, the opposition to the reintroduction of any kind of property tax has been fierce.

To replace the revenue lost to county and town councils, which have to provide local services, the central government gave local authorities a grant every year.  And that had to be paid for out of central revenue, from income taxes and sales taxes and so on.

So of course right from the very beginning the idea that property tax could be "vanished" into thin air was nonsense. Someone still had to pay for road maintenance and street lighting and sewage treatment and all the rest of the services that keep our local areas safe and civilized.   We still paid, except that now it was in extra tax to central government.

We stuck with that system for the last 36 years for two reasons.  Firstly, for most of the time, central government was able to pay the bill without jacking up taxes to levels that people could not pay.   Secondly, politicians of all parties were too cowardly to propose the reintroduction of local property tax.

But it was never a good idea.  It removed the link between local tax and local services and people got the idea that central revenue was a bottomless pit.  And that always leads to inefficiencies and waste.

Over the years, local councils found new ways of raising revenue.   Even though all our taxes had gone up, many of them began to charge for or privatize services that used to be free.  For example, it now costs me €8.50 ($11) to get my normal size garbage bin emptied.

During the property boom, local councils also raked in millions by charging developers inflated charges for connecting new houses to local services like roads, street lighting, water and sewage.
But most of their funding -- hundreds of millions of euro -- still came from central funds. When the crash came a few years back, this was a big problem. 

Central government revenue collapsed, as did the revenue from the development charges that local councils had been applying.   The result was that central government could no longer afford to pay the massive grant to local councils, and local councils were unable to raise enough money to pay for services.

Two years ago when Ireland entered the bailout, the troika (the IMF-EU-ECB) officials took one look at the situation and said it was ridiculous, that we should have a local property tax like all other European countries.  They made it a condition of giving Ireland the bailout money, writing it into the bailout program so that it specifically commits us to the introduction of a local property tax.

Viewed objectively, it all makes sense.   Local councils must have the money to run essential local services.  The national budget deficit has to be reduced, and removing the huge amount the government now transfers to local councils every year will make that easier.

But from the taxpayer’s point of view, it's not that simple.   If we're all going to be paying local property tax now, can we have a reduction in the income tax we have to pay to central government through the Revenue?  Can pigs fly?

No, the reality is that we're going to end up paying on the double, and that's why so many people here are so angry.  

They feel, with a great deal of justification, that income taxes and sales taxes here are now so high that we are already paying enough.

There is also the fact that although there was no annual property tax here, it is incorrect to suggest that no tax was raised from property. 

Every time a property was sold it attracted a huge amount of tax.  As prices soared during the boom, so did the amount that the government was getting in property taxes.

On good size family houses the stamp duty (or sales tax) was six percent or even nine percent if the house sold for over €1 million.

So a lot of people who bought homes during the boom years paid a huge amount in sales tax (upwards of €25,000 was normal on a family size home).  These people are not being given any credit for this and will now be hit with this annual property tax just like everyone else.

For buyers of new homes during the boom (many of which are now deep in negative equity) there is also the fact that adding together all the charges and taxes (including income tax from construction workers and sales taxes on materials) meant that around half of the cost of every new house was going to the Revenue in one form or another.   Naturally these people also feel that imposing an annual property tax on them now is double taxation.

For people who bought property during the boom and are now in negative equity and who may be among the tens of thousands who are way behind in their mortgage payments, the idea of having to pay this new property tax seems not just impossible but grossly unfair.

But in spite of all the problems, the government (and our troika masters) is determined to drive forward with this new source of funding.  

And because it's being administered not by local councils but by the Revenue, which has the power to look into personal banks accounts, etc. and ultimately apply draconian penalties or even jail people who don't pay, there will be no escape.

Even for people who are not in mortgage distress, it's hard to take.  We already have a marginal rate of income tax of 52 percent, or 55 percent if you are self-employed like me.

On top of that we pay tax on almost everything, with heavy sales taxes, motor taxes, garbage payments and water charges starting at the end of next year. 

About half the population pay very expensive private health insurance, so they are paying for their health care as well even though over 10 percent of their income tax pays for the public health service.  

And although education is supposed to be free, all schools every year ask parents for contributions to help them make ends meet.

The property tax comes into effect on July 1, which means that this year people will only have to pay half what it will be in future years.  Softening the blow in this way is part of the government's strategy.

The tax is payable on the current market value of all residential properties.  It will levied at the rate of 0.18 percent for properties up to a market value of €1 million, and 0.25 percent on properties over €1 million (the higher rate applying only to the portion over the million mark).

That sounds simple enough but there are all kinds of practical difficulties.  It's a self-assessment tax, so how do you value your house after the property crash when the housing market is at a standstill? 

Unless you live in a development where there are lots of similar houses, some of which have sold recently, how are you supposed to know what your house is worth?

To help with the calculation, the letters from the Revenue include guidelines on how to value your property, but they are so general they are practically useless.  You are also advised to consult property sale websites and local property agents in your area (who will charge you for a valuation!)  

If you live out in a rural area or on a road where the houses are a mixture, it really is guesswork.

Who knows what a house is worth these days until you put it on the market and find a buyer?
There is no property ownership register in Ireland which also makes the task difficult, although there are electoral registers and of course the electricity and gas companies and phone companies have registers.  Revenue has the power to access these databases, so avoiding the tax is going to be very difficult.

So far, most people here seem to be accepting the reality that they will have to pay, even if they are angry and depressed about it and can't afford the few hundred euro it will cost them.  (A typical family home valued at €375,000 will owe property tax of €337 this year and €675 next year for a full year.)

That's a lot of money for many families to find, especially where someone may have lost a job or pay has been cut.   A small number of defiant people have been declaring that they can't and won't pay. 
But the Revenue will be able to extract the money from welfare payments or pay packets, if necessary so it may be taken before people can stop it vanishing.

If you are caught undervaluing your property (say when the true value is revealed when you sell it at some point in the future) the Revenue will hit you for the back tax and also with very heavy penalties which could double your bill.   They say they will only do this if they believe you have deliberately undervalued the property.

One thing is sure -- it's going to be painful for everyone.

End to Ireland’s disastrous bank guarantee - an achievement at the expense of the Irish State

Irish graffiti former Finance Minister Brian Lenihan and former Taoiseach Brian Cowen

At midnight last Thursday the disastrous blanket guarantee given to the Irish banks in September 2008 by the last government reached the end of its extended term and finally came to an end. 

The present government believes that the banks are strong enough now to function without the guarantee and will be able to access the funding they need without state back-up.

That remains to be seen.  In the meantime, the ending of the guarantee last week was hailed as evidence of the success of the present government's policies. 

In fairness, it is an achievement of sorts.  But it has come at the expense of the Irish state pumping billions and billions into our banks over the last four years to pay their debts and to recapitalize them, which means that with one exception they are now all owned by us taxpayers (and we own a chunk of the single exception).

Whether our state owned banks could now fail to pay their debts without the country appearing to default is doubtful.  So the announcement of the ending of the state guarantee for Irish banks last week may be more for the optics than anything else.   But it is certainly a welcome footnote to a disastrous period in the Irish economy.

The infamous state guarantee decision in September 2008 ended up bankrupting the country within two years.   In 2010, with the state unable to cope with the mountain of bank debt, the guarantee had forced us into the IMF bailout and into the program that robbed us of our economic sovereignty.

That state guarantee was the worst decision ever taken by an Irish government.   Of course it was presented at the time as being a temporary measure necessary to avoid a run on our banks.

At the time the markets were worried about our faltering property boom.  Billions in deposits were being pulled out of Irish banks that September and their share prices were plummeting.

The crisis intensified over a couple of weeks.  There was a real danger that our banks would collapse altogether.

So after an all night crisis meeting with the bankers on September 30, 2008, the government gave the infamous blanket guarantee which meant that all the deposits in the Irish banks and all their debts were underwritten by the Irish state.  This was necessary, we were told, to stabilize the banks.  We didn't want the ATMs to run out of cash, did we?

We were assured that the banks had a temporary liquidity problem, but that basically they were solvent.  The Irish property boom would end in a soft landing, not a crash, and everything would be okay.

In the beginning we were told that we were on the hook for a few billion.  Trying to gauge in 2008 how big the potential risk was going to be meant guessing how far the market was going to fall.  

Either the bankers did not know or deliberately underplayed the scale of the problem.  The politicians, Brian Cowen and Brian Lenihan, and the top civil servants who were involved, failed to grasp what they might be getting themselves -- and the rest of us -- into.

In the end, as we now know, the total guarantee given by the state to the banks meant we had jumped into a black hole and no one knew how deep it was.  We soon learned that the amount involved -- the liabilities of the Irish banks in debts and deposits -- was close to half a trillion euro.  

A significant portion of that had been given out in toxic property loans and we ended up pumping around €64 billion into the Irish banks to make up for the losses and enable the banks to pay back their liabilities without all of them going bust.

Financing that, plus paying for our budget deficits, bankrupted the country and forced us to take the €85 billion IMF bailout in 2010.   And the repayments on that debt are now a millstone around our necks and will be for decades to come.

Coincidentally, last week's resolution of the crisis in Cyprus prompted further revelations about the disastrous bank guarantee in Ireland in 2008. 

Speaking last week in the wake of the decision to burn depositors in banks in Cyprus, the German finance minister was asked what implications this had for Ireland, where we had been forced by the EU to pay back all the bondholders and depositors in full to avoid undermining confidence in European banks.

Minister Wolfgang Schauble said that this was different and that Ireland itself had the "sole responsibility" for giving the bank guarantee in 2008.  This was very interesting because despite strenuous efforts by the media here, no one knows what happened at the all night meeting on September 30, 2008 between the bankers, the politicians and their advisers. 

Even though this is the most important financial decision ever taken in Ireland, we have been kept completely in the dark.  Here at last was a chink of light.

Schauble stated categorically that the disastrous blanket bank guarantee was an Irish decision alone.  It was not forced on us by Germany or the European Central Bank or the IMF, as has often been suggested.  According to him, we dug our own grave.

This is a vitally important issue for Ireland because it was this decision, effectively turning the mountain of debt owed by the banks into sovereign debt owed by the Irish taxpayer, that caused us to go under.

Despite what Schauble says, we don't know how much pressure was put on Ireland at the time to give the guarantee, even if the final decision was left to us.  We do know, however, that it was an absolute condition of us getting the EU-IMF €85 billion bailout in 2010 that all depositors, bondholders and other lenders to our banks had to be paid back in full.

It was the EU view that any default by Irish banks could cause "contagion" across European banks and a possible bank run in some countries.  So us failing to pay back some big investors/depositors or imposing a haircut on bondholders was out of the question.

So Ireland bit the bullet and started paying back all the bondholders and investors, a process that is now almost complete and was achieved with bailout money that has to be paid back.   

Since then we have seen the EU policy  on this question shift in Greece and now in Cyprus.  It seems that now bondholders or depositors can and will be burned if an EU bank gets into trouble.

What this means, of course, is that the EU is now admitting that the full bank debt repayment policy it imposed on Ireland, either in September 2008 or in the couple of years after that, was wrong. 

Forcing Ireland to transform all the private bank debt into sovereign taxpayer debt was wrong.

Despite this effective admission, however, the EU is not changing its policy towards Ireland on the debt question.   We got a half promise last year that private bank debt and sovereign debt would be separated in EU countries that got into trouble.  

We argued that this should be applied retrospectively to us.   But so far, despite the Cyprus deal, nothing has been done.

If it did happen, the new EU financial rescue funds could take over our bank debt and leave the Irish taxpayer to deal with our budget deficit debt.  If Spain and Italy get into deeper trouble, you can be sure that some variation of this will happen.  Either that or more depositors/bondholders will be getting a haircut.

Ireland's problem is that it was the first country to get into trouble, and since then the rules of the game have changed. And in spite of all the sympathetic guff from our "colleagues" in Europe, no one cares too much that we have been left holding a very bad hand.

As you know, we recently got a deal from Europe on about half of our bank debt mountain (the Anglo-Irish half) which extended our repayment time for that part of the bailout money by a couple of decades.   But, crucially, it did not include any debt write down. 

We are also campaigning in Europe for a similar deal on the rest of the bank debt mountain, to push our bailout repayments on that out into the future.  But again there is no suggestion of a write down.

Morally, all of this stinks.  Ireland was forced into the dire position it is now in by the EU, but Europe does not want to share the cost of what has happened to us.  They refuse to help even though it was saving European banks and the euro that got us into the mess.  

Europe thinks it's okay now to change policy and offer different solutions to other countries, and that Ireland's taxpayers should carry on as before bearing a huge repayment burden.

The end of the state guarantee last week does not change any of this.  Nor does it mean Irish banks are out of the woods.  

There's a mountain of bad domestic mortgage debt coming down the tracks here which could make the Irish banks insolvent again.   Unless of course the Irish government puts more borrowed billions into them and the Irish taxpayer is again left to pay the bill.  Watch this space.