Dr Michael O'Sullivan will be visiting UL in a few weeks. Here he is in the SBP talking sense about Irish bonds and debt structures. 

Best bits:

The rise in Irish government bond yields to historically high spreads to German yields has led scaremongers to cry that Ireland is the next Iceland. This ignores obvious qualitative differences between the two countries and, importantly, disregards the possibility that Ireland could have followed the example of Switzerland, another country with a high ratio of banking assets to GDP (like Ireland, Iceland and Britain), but where policy-making has in general been much more elegant and closely attuned to the credit crisis.

Ireland is not another Iceland, but the bond market is rightly worried that the transfer in risk from the state balance sheet to those of households and the banking sector, which began after the ERM crisis in 1992, is now coming full circle.

After the crisis, Ireland’s policymakers redoubled their efforts to prepare the state finances for eventual eurozone membership, in particular reducing government debt.

...

The key issue here is that the government’s efforts to rescue the banking system have not reduced the risks to the economy and banking system, but rather transferred them from one party to another, in this case the taxpayer. It could also be argued that, in some respects, government actions so far - for instance, in guaranteeing all banks - have augmented these risks. In this respect, it is imperative that any further refinancing of the banks be done to the advantage of the state (for example, banks should have to write down assets very aggressively before receiving funding).