 The central problem with the Irish situation is that a massive accumulation of private debt ended up being socialised, being taken on by the state. During the 2000s, property speculators in Ireland borrowed enormous sums of money from Irish banks, Irish banks borrowed it from European banks and when it looked as though that system was going to come crashing down, the Irish government issued a guarantee backing all of that private debt and leaving all of that debt on the government books. And that's really the main reason why Ireland now has this massive sovereign debt crisis. Well the trike is definitely not a good option to manage debt in Europe. One of the ironies of this situation is I come from a global justice background, I've been campaigning on issues of global south debt for many years and of course the IMF has never been a hero of ours in those circles and yet the IMF has actually been not the worst actor in the trike. If you look at the Irish situation, the IMF proposed some modest write down of some of the debts that were owed to private creditors and that was vetoed by the European Central Bank and by the European Commission. So you know you're in trouble when the IMF is the least bad cop on the block. So the trike is definitely not the answer here and that's obviously true not just in Ireland but in other countries as well where you've had very similar policies, Greece, Portugal, the Baltic countries etc. In terms of the alternative, I think the ideal alternative would be some kind of cross European solidarity among debtor countries, a progressive coordinated multilateral write down. Failing that, I think the next best option is unilateral action by governments who have the will to do it in terms of writing down debt. Well Ireland has ostensibly exited its bailout program, it is supposedly a sovereign and independent nation again, but of course in practice it's not, it's carrying this enormous burden of debt which as a proportion of income has not actually even peaked yet and some of the debt, some of the socialised private debt has been converted into a particular form of government bond, the last of which is going to fall due for repayment in about 40 years time. So unless action is taken even at this relatively late stage but not too late stage to write down debt, then our grandchildren are going to end up repaying this debt and of course in the meantime enormous damage has been inflicted on our society in terms of unemployment, in terms of cutbacks, cuts in people's living standards, people who could afford at least, cuts in health and education, rising suicide rates, rising alcoholism and very high levels of immigration. So a high social price has already been paid and I think it's very important to ensure that that price is not paid into the indefinite future.