Brendan Howlin has soberly explained that they looked at all the options and reached the conclusion that burning the senior bondholders would not be worth the consequent costs. This is sensible.
It is not however what they promised, and it’s not why we voted for them.
If not this way, then how are we going to punish the speculators, the people who drove house prices into the idiosphere and turned a healthy growing economy into molten radioactive waste? It seems we are not going to punish these people. We are in fact going to reward them.
So who will be to blame when they do it again?