You have to feel sorry for the Irish. Their luck really does look as if it’s running out. The measures which the Irish have taken to deal with the financial crisis met with widespread approval. They got on with wielding the knife early and wielding it deep. The painful austerity plan in order to get its debt down has been accepted by the population who appear to accept that the Celtic Tiger partied too long and too hard and are willing to endure the hangover. They haven’t been lobbing fire bombs on the streets of Dublin as the irate Greeks have been doing in Athens.

The Irish were no angels – they went on their credit binge, too. But at least their doctors paid their tax rather than taking €500 back-handers in cash when they took a kid’s tonsils out like the medics were fond of doing in Greece. Maybe they cut too much too quickly, but there seems to be no reward for virtue. What’s certain is that for all its noble aims, the members of the Euro show little sense of solidarity and acting together when the crap hits the fan. It’s every government for itself.

But the markets now don’t like the look of Ireland, and this week its 10-year government bonds have begun to develop surging yields as vultures and hedge funds hinted at default. Although words of support from the EU finance ministers this morning have put a temporary halt to the possibility of a bail-out, the underlying problem remains. How can they reassure investors that they are a decent bet?

Business in Ireland appears devoid of confidence at the moment. Little wonder when the population shows such low enthusiasm for spending what little spare cash it has kicking about. The whole place is uncharacteristically anaemic. I’m not giving much away when I tell you that there are an alarming number of Irish names and companies in or around the bottom 20 companies in this year’s Most Admired Companies list, which will be announced in early December.

I recall experiencing part of the Irish property madness in the late 90s when I ended up staying for a week in a cottage that a farmer’s wife called Mrs Moriarty had slung up on the Dingle peninsula. The planning laws seemed astonishingly lax for such an area of natural beauty. We marched into our grim bungalow and the sofa collapsed the first time one of our guests sat down on it. As the week went on and the rain fell outside, the fixtures and fittings fell off one by one in the kitchen and bathroom. I dread to think how much Mrs Moriarty borrowed from her bank to put it up in the first place and what her equity to debt ratio for the property is like now. The final insult was an eighty quid supplement for heating in July. Not a problem tourists ever have in Greece….