Ireland's day of reckoning has arrived. When Brian Lenihan meets his fellow European Union finance ministers in Brussels on Tuesday, he will find himself in the surreal position of being begged to accept a European Union bailout, despite the fact Ireland doesn't need to tap bond markets until the middle of next year and his government will next month deliver a budget which it believes will enable the country to bring its borrowing under control. But this crisis is now about the survival of the eurozone. Lenihan should take the money —and the rest of Europe must hope that does the trick.

For Lenihan this will be a bitter moment. For the last two years, he has done almost everything the markets could have expected to maintain investor support. But his government's decision in September 2008 to guarantee almost all the unsecured creditors in its banking system proved a single catastrophic misjudgement. The public finances have been overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the losses that have emerged from the banks.