From Ireland’s point of view, saving even a fraction of this amount would have been a valuable contribution to the fiscal adjustment and the Irish authorities were, by late 2010, prepared to take the risk of a potential adverse effect on funding costs, especially now that the Sovereign’s financing was under the protection of the Programme.
I think it’s fair to say that European decision makers subsequently had misgivings about having blocked this bail-in (not least when they eventually came around to the view, now embodied in the European bank resolution legislation, that Governments should be largely insulated from the costs of failing banks).