MEDIA REACTION:IN A story headlined "Irish Grasp at EU, IMF Lifeline", the Wall Street Journaldescribed the Government's "grudging decision" to accept foreign aid as a "bitter moment" for Ireland.
The story, which was the most read on the newspaper's website yesterday, referred to
The Irish Times
"Was it for this?" editorial on Thursday, and noted that Ireland's independence "long fought and hard won, still resonates vibrantly in the public sphere".
Describing this week's developments as a "moment of truth" for the euro zone, the paper focused on the threat to Ireland's corporate tax regime, noting that many EU states had "chafed at Ireland's use of low corporate taxes to woo business".
The corporate tax issue featured prominently in other newspapers' coverage, including the Financial Timesand Le Figaro.
Ireland "faces a corporation tax showdown" ran the headline on the FT's front page yesterday.
The tax rate had emerged as a "major point of contention" as EU and IMF negotiators arrived in Dublin. Any increase "would be a casus belli with the Irish", one European official said.
The standoff showed how "politically explosive the negotiations have become", the paper noted, going on to describe a "deeply unpopular government . . . on the brink of a desperate fight for re-election".
Questions over the Government's prospects featured heavily in several newspapers.
"[Brian] Cowen is on the ropes, as the nation is stung by a roiling banking crisis and a budget deficit almost three times worse than the one in the US when measured against the size of the economy," wrote a reporter in the Washington Post. Readers were reminded that the Taoiseach had been "lampooned by the likes of Jay Leno and skewered by the national media . . . finding himself the butt of every joke in Dublin pubs".
Siobhán Dowling in Der Spiegelseized on an EU Observer report which quoted a Brussels official referring to the bailout as the "Oliver Cromwell package", saying such descriptions are "unlikely to go down well" in Ireland.
Some newspapers turned to Irish novelists to try to make sense of the week's events. In the Guardian, Joseph O'Connor wrote of "the strange and ferocious trauma we are undergoing an identity crisis so viral and all-engulfing that we don't know who we are any more". He said "this has been a dreadful and agonised awakening, and we have a thousand miles of hard road before us".
In the New York Times, under the headline "The Debtor of the Western World", John Banville wrote of "little left to celebrate, with nothing to be seen in the skies save, in the murky distance but approaching ever nearer, the Four Horsemen of our particular Apocalypse: the IMF, the European Commission, Brussels and the Iron Chancellor Angela Merkel".
In the London Independent, Irish-born comment editor Katherine Butler said Irish people needed to look closer to home for the real traitors, while an editorial in Gulf newspaper the Peninsula, asked: "After Greece, is it Ireland's turn now?"
Such a prospect, it said, was "sending shivers across the world".