The direct lending by the Central Bank of Ireland is of course carried out with the prior knowledge and approval of the ECB: the suggestion sometimes heard, that the ECB might be about to cut-off the Irish banks, is very wide of the mark.
The fact that the origin of the inflationary upsurge of the 1970s is to be found in the finetuning policies of that era provides a stark illustration of the dangers associated with systematic government intervention under normal circumstances – specifically, under circumstances which are not characterised by irreducible uncertainty.