No I'm not. Burn them. Tax them to oblivion. But the issue is not whether the elites or the people are to shoulder the blame. Under current arrangements workers pay for the debt and the elites (Irish, German etc) are free to make even more money and reflate some new bubble or whatever the magic fairy of unfettered markets tells them to do. How is that fair? At this point getting rid of the austerity seems a prerequisite for even the most basic popular input in the matter. And this is not solely an Irish  matter. Why should we care to protect German (or Irish, or whatever) bankers?

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

I agree the Irish elites need to be held accountable, in the strict sense of that word.  All those "profits" (sic) need to be seized and used to help alleviate the crises.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Ah, right blame the ECB. Because the irish elites who created this low tax no regulation paradise are not blame at all. Instead they got you rooting for them.

Did you miss the part where I argued that the Irish oligarchs need to lose their shirts as well?

Here's a hint:

Then you make two lines on each of the two lists: One line between people you really, really want to save (ordinary bank depositors, industrial firms, etc.) and people you kinda sorta want to save if you can (private pension funds, non-toxic investment banks - if you have any of those left - etc.), and another line between the people you kinda sorta want to save and the evil people who should take a long walk off a short pier (bookies, toxic investment banks, everything with a business address on Canary Wharf).

Then you mix the lists like this:

Domestic need-to-save
Foreign need-to-save
Domestic want-to-save
Foreign want-to-save
Evil (foreign and domestic)

All the people on the 'evil' part of the list should ultimately end up losing their shirts completely.

And Iceland: I still think the glorious icelandish plan to split their banks and give the new part the assets and the old the debts was fraudulent.

That is a perfectly ordinary bank intervention. There is nothing fraudulent about that, and indeed it is how a bank is put through bankruptcy every month somewhere in the OECD.

But in the long run they will pay anyway.

No. Really, they won't have to pay anybody who isn't going to send a gunboat to Reykjavik.

They may want to pay some of their creditors, because they view their claims as legitimate, or because they want to avoid the political fallout from not paying them. But sovereign states never have to pay their creditors.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Because the irish elites who created this low tax no regulation paradise are not blame at all.

They're already fucked. Most of them are down to whatever small numbers of millions they managed to squirrel away in the wife's name. They're not exactly homeless and starving, but they're down to a small percentage of their previous "wealth".  The ones that aren't are the ones who were rich before the boom. Some of them are still managing to appear rich, but they're standing in the air at the top of a canyon they just haven't noticed.