On October 18, 2010, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy famously walked the beach in Deauville, on the French coast of Normandy. The German chancellor and then French president later issued a surprise statement widely seen in retrospect as having paved the way for both the precipitation of Ireland’s financial crash and its bailout. The agreement, at Merkel’s initiative, was built around a quid-pro-quo. The bailout programme hastily put together for Greece a few months earlier should be replaced by a “permanent and robust framework to ensure orderly crisis management in the future”. This, however, should be available as a last…

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