Ireland's Fianna Fail leaders must rue the day they ever allowed Patrick Honohan to take charge of the Irish central bank.
As they defiantly deny that a rescue is under way even as EU and IMF officials fan out across Dublin, the governor has breezily pulled the rug from under their feet.
The country will need a "very substantial" package worth "tens of billions" to halt what amounts to a run on the Irish banking system, and therefore on the Irish sovereign state.
"These talks are serious talks. The IMF and the European Commission and ECB would not send large teams if they didn't believe first of all that they could agree to a package. That is what is definitely likely to happen," he told RTE television.
Twisting the knife deeper, he took away the fig leaf that this is just a banking crisis. "If the confidence isn't there, it's partially not there because investors are concerned in general about the government's finances and the future prospects for growth and employment."
He was picked by a blue-ribbon panel to restore the shattered credibility of the Irish central bank in September 2009, ending the tradition where the job would always go to a political insider from the treasury. If the panel's purpose was to entrust the financial machinery of the Irish state a man of total independence, they succeeded. Dr Honohan has been the scourge of the government ever since.
The Celtic Tiger in the 1990s was a genuine phase of catch-up growth and supply-side dynamism as global phama, IT and financial groups established hubs in the country. The economy went off the rails after 2000 when credit exploded under "complacent and permissive" regulation.
By 2006, a third of all first-time home buyers had 100pc mortgages, and two-thirds were above 90pc. Bank reliance on foreign funding rose from 10pc of GDP in 2003 to 60pc by 2008.
The political class did not understand the Faustian Pact of monetary union. "Eurozone membership certainly contributed to the property boom, and to the deteriorating drift in wage competitiveness. Real interest rates from 1998 to 2007 averaged -1pc [compared with plus 7pc in the early 1990s]," argued Dr Honohan.
"To be sure, all of these imbalances and misalignments could have happened outside EMU, but the policy antennae had not been retuned in Ireland. Warning signs were muted. Lacking these prompts, Irish policy-makers neglected the basics of public finance."
Fianna Fail stood idly by as the ECB's ultra-low interest rates set off an explosive credit boom, failing to offset excess stimulus with fiscal tightening. It made matters worse by relying on "fair weather" taxes – capital gains, property and corporate taxes (together 30pc of revenues in 2006) – that created windfall revenues and flattered public accounts.
They deluded themselves into thinking they were governing responsibly because the budget was in surplus and the national debt was the lowest in western Europe, as a share of GPD. The mask has now been ripped away. The deficit will be 32pc of GDP this year. The debt will flirt with 100pc, the tipping point when debt dynamics become unstable.
"There was complacency about joining the single currency in a number of countries. People thought things would take care of themselves, and they have had more than a wake-up call," he said in a recent interview with The Daily Telegraph.