This is a story about central bank balance sheets, monetary policy, and other obscure matters.  Here is the punchline: this year, the Irish state has started to pay a new stream of money directly to the Irish banks. The payment is likely to be small this year, but I estimate it will ramp up to between €1.5 and €2.6 billion in 2023. It’s a stream that will continue for the foreseeable future. The stream of payments to banks is an inadvertent consequence of ECB monetary policy over the last 14 years. The context is as follows. Between 2008 and 2021,…

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