Today, as the talks between the EU and the IMF on an $112.5 billion Irish aid package conclude, the wealthy and the well-connected scoundrels who dumped their debts onto the Irish people still look like they might get away with it.

Those self-serving bankers, developers and politicians who treated Ireland like their own private casino have just handed their fellow citizens a 19 century diet of austerity, poverty and heartache (because, they suspect, they'll never fight back).

And if you ever imagined the people responsible for this disaster would share in the losses, or acknowledge their culpability, then today you've had your fingers rubbed on the fiery braille of what's really happening.

Instead of seeing these bankers and developers hoisted on their Louis Copeland designed petards, Fianna Fail stepped in to guarantee the banks’ debts, turning private losses into public obligations.

Let's just consider what that actually means: in Ireland our homegrown golden circle, the men who walk between the raindrops no matter how bad the economic weather, can privatize their profits and socialize their losses.

That's exactly the kind of political trade-off that caused French aristocrats to lose their heads once.

And let's also pause to consider just how hard won Irish independence was. Men and women gave their lives to win our sovereignty - and now we're just going to hand it over the IMF and the EU without a fight because loose banking regulations and government ineptitude created this disaster?

If Ireland can't pay then Ireland must default and follow the example set in Iceland.

Punishing the Irish public for the mistakes of a small and unrepresentative group of rogue bankers is simply unfair and frankly the massive new IMF/EU debt load is much too high to be paid back.

The Irish public's new diet of nettle soup and hard rain is about to come to a boil, I predict.