What the hell happened?
I think they went on the Euro.....
As in the US the Irish banks went on a crazy binge of lending to property developers and like all bubbles the Irish property bubble burst, rather spectacularly.
It’s actually worse than that though, there is an unmistakable stench of corruption reeking out of the near collapse of one of the banks, Anglo-Irish, where a golden circle of prominent businessmen and the directors of the bank were lending and re-lending each other sweetheart loans, the horrific scale of which is only now becoming clear (a wee bit too complex to go into in detail).
There is no actual hard evidence of criminality, yet, but the whole thing stinks to high heavens and the Irish people are in a state of shock at the cataclysm that has hit them.