I think you'd find it hard to find an Irish economist who doesn't believe that the exceptionally low ECB interest rates at a time of 8-10% "growth" in the Irish economy didn't contribute to the asset price bubble.  "market forces" determined that cheap credit availability resulted in increasingly higher asset prices.  Whether the primary blame is placed on the "cheap" or on the "availability" is a matter we can debate. But I would tend toward the former. There simply wasn't a culture, in Ireland or the EU, to go for some heavy handed bank regulation at the time.

Index of Frank's Diaries