A long time ago, when I was in Swansea University, I had my one and only confrontation with an Irish person. His name was Rocky. He was about 6’6” tall and once drunkenly asked people at a party if they wanted to join the IRA. He then told me (after I declined the offer mentioned above, which he later said was a bad joke) that the Welsh were the Irish who had been too stupid to learn to swim.

I glared back and told him that he had it a bit backwards and that the Irish were the Welsh who had been too cowardly to stay and fight the bloody English. There was a moment of bright and crystalline tension and then Rocky roared with laughter, slapped me on the back and bought me a very large drink.

The point of this anecdote is to stress the fact that I’ve always had a soft spot for Ireland, partly because I’m an eighth Irish and partly because I like Irish girls (hell, I married one. Ok, so she’s Irish-American, but you get the picture).

We went to Ireland for a long weekend about four years ago. It was a bit chilly and we were baffled by the giant spike in O’Connell Street (if you stand at the bottom of it and look up you get this weird sensation that you’re falling up it) but we had a great time. Ireland, it seemed, was booming and Dublin was a hell of a great place to be.

Well, not perhaps right now. If you think that the US and UK economies are going through a rough patch, you should see Ireland’s economy right now. It isn’t a pretty sight.

Ireland was badly hit by the financial crisis and its banks are now effectively insolvent (they have losses of 80 billion euros, or $109 billion), being propped up by the European Central Bank. Its deficit as a percentage of its gross domestic product is, based on 2009 figures, 14.3%. That’s worse than Greece, which has a deficit of 13.6%.

The Irish Government has therefore had to slash its spending, cutting billions of Euros from its budget as the country wallows in the slough of one of the worst depressions (not a recession) it’s ever known. Unemployment is up sharply and there is increasing danger that the eternal Irish problem of a brain drain might be about to skewer the country’s future yet again as the young flee in search of jobs.

The European Union is pressing for the country to take a bailout, something that the Irish Government is desperate to avoid, as any such bailout would leave the country with all kinds of terms and conditions that would lead to more budgetary blood on the floor and its banks forced to stop lending, which will deepen the depression still further. You’re going to see quite a bit on the news (the real news, not Fox “News”) about the Irish crisis over the next few weeks.

I’ve been racking my brains to find a cheerful closer for this piece. I can’t, it’s too serious a situation. I could fall back on a cheap and cheerful metaphor, such as hoping for the luck of the Irish to kick in, but that would be lazy of me. So all I’ll say is please spare a thought for Ireland.