I have to admit, I don't get this. They're talking about splitting Anglo-Irish into a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ bank. This means they're actually going to make a bank worse than Anglo-Irish is already. That's some trick. I guess they plan to hive off whatever good assets Anglo-Irish have and keep the rest to rot. But what's the point in that? The State still owns the same amount of good and bad assets however you slice it.

Unless they're thinking of selling the profitable bit as a going concern to raise money to pay for the bad, which sounds worryingly like short-term thinking. Again.

If they do this though it's just going to lead to more hard choices. When they were originally thinking about nationalising Anglo-Irish I speculated whether they would rename it Irish-Anglo-Irish Bank, or simply Irish-Irish. It's perhaps as well that they kept the name though, as it offers a solution to what to call the two new halves.

The only question that remains: do we name the bad bank ‘Anglo’ or ‘Irish’?

It's a tricky one. Perhaps we should decide it by tossing a coin – after all, we're throwing money at them already. Calling it Anglo Bank would be to suggest that it was all somehow the fault of the English.

Everything ultimately is of course, but it wears rather thin as an excuse.

To call it Irish Bank on the other hand suggests a sort of Yellow Pack (that dates me) or value brand, a generic Irish bank made of all the ingredients that you expect from the product – abysmal management, insolent attitude to small customers, endemic corruption – in one neat no-frills package.

A caricature of course that wouldn't reflect too well on the other Irish banks, to put it mildly, but perhaps they deserve it.

If we need to break with that name though, I could think of other pairings that would be cute. I like the Bank of Optimism and the Bank of Experience. The Bank of Cause and the Bank of Effect maybe. Or how about a teeny-tiny Bank of Truth and a great big Bank of Bullshit? I like that.

And I'm talking a real bank here. It would be too easy on ourselves to hide our bad bank away by having it only exist on paper. We need to remember this episode. So when the Bank of Ireland gives us the old parliament building as part of its reparations, I suggest we use that.
Imagine, in great big lettering – preferably illuminated – right there overlooking College Green. The Bank of Bullshit. And perhaps a plaque below that worded something like:

“In Memory of Those who gave their Hopes and their Homes in the Great Bullshit Outbreak of the 21st Century, that we may never again be seduced into paying too much for things by the offer of easy money to pay for them with.

For let it never be forgotten that when the value of a house drops to a fraction of what you borrowed for it, the Bank of Bullshit still needs to be paid in full.”

Remind me again, why do they need to be paid?