The Irish Bail-Out

"It's the only way," said Brian Cowen. Except, as Argentina could tell him, it's not. You regulate against reckless lending and out-of-control bonus payments by hitting the people who run the banks, not the ones who clean their floors. "We'll make the banks smaller," Cowen promised, but the only thing they're cutting so far is the €8.65 an hour minimum wage.

"All changed, changed utterly," Yeats once wrote. But as the Irish workers are about to discover, there's nothing beautiful about the IMF.