'Our decision will contribute to keeping medium and long-term inflationary expectations anchored at levels consistent with inflationary expectations,' said the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, when announcing a quarter of a percentage point interest rate increase last week.
I'm not sure this means anything in English but I gather he was expressing a hope that Europeans would start looking a little more to their measure when cutting their cloth.
"This is not an ex ante decision to engage in a series of decisions to increase interest rates in the future," he elaborated, which loosely translated suggests this increase is a warning shot.
He'll be lucky. Whatever about the rest of Europe, the Celtic Tiger has moved well beyond the point where either injunctions or warning shots might have much effect. Already the local analysts are telling us that, what with the vast sums to be pumped into the economy by Brian Cowen on Wednesday, and the effects of the SSIAs coming on stream next October, Monsieur Trichet can put his interest rate hike in his pipe and smoke it. And this means that this rate hike will have indeed been an "ex ante decision".
For several years now, the Irish Central Bank has published on an almost weekly basis figures indicating that increasing levels of personal debt are exposing huge numbers of us to serious risk in the event of a sharp rise in interest rates. An explosion in mortgage lending and credit card debt means the debts of the average Irish taxpayer now exceed annual after-tax income. But as the warnings became more shrill, the debt piled higher.
If you ask me, it was the introduction of the euro that, far more than low interest rates, caused our sense of means and dreams, incomings and outgoing, to become disengaged from one another.
Nobody explained to us then that a currency becomes internalised in the human mind, in much the same way as a religion, and can't be expunged except at a similar cost. Nobody told us that the euro was really a means of getting us to throw our money away.
At the time we hoped that calculating the relationship between the old and new currencies would become second nature after a while. It never did. And not only did the free electronic calculators distributed by the Government do nothing to help - they made things worse by suggesting the issue was arithmetic.
But this was not about maths - it was, and remains, a metaphysical problem. Shortly after the introduction of the euro, I remember feeling a sense of despair about understanding the value of anything ever again. Before, I could look at an object in a shop and have a general sense of its worth, but the euro caused this facility to desert me. Comparing the punt with the euro was like comparing an apple with an orange. Only in the past year have I stopped evaluating things in terms of their value in punts. And this isn't because I've understood the euro as I once instinctively understood the punt - it's because I have come to accept my enforced innumeracy. To begin with, a euro was worth less than a punt - 20 per cent less - which made you think you had grown richer overnight. This issue of value seemed to conspire with that of durability. A €20 note looked like real money, but soon became dog-eared and tatty, so you developed this urge to throw it away. It was as though consumer recklessness was built into its design.
Everything seemed much dearer. Was it just that 25 per cent or something more sinister? You could compute it, approximately, but really you just had a sense that the price had gone up - a lot. You just knew that, where once you felt safe with a tenner, now you needed €20.
You went to a cash dispenser to withdraw some spending money, and hadn't the faintest idea how much you'd need. Adding 25 per cent to what you'd normally withdraw was as meaningless as withdrawing twice or three times as much. You thought of a number. And when you came to the check-out, you just put your hand in your purse, scooped out a lump of money, held it out and said, "Take it outa that". And you never had enough, so you went back to the ATM for another pocketful.
We don't spend money anymore: we gave it away. We have no idea how much we're down, how much is left, or how much we've been ripped-off.
The low interest rates arrived bang on cue: unable to comprehend our own resources, we extended the boundary of our means to embrace anything a financial institution would cough up.
Occasionally, when a bank statement comes in, we sneak a look and recoil, horrified. But we feel better about all this, knowing that even the Minister for Finance - as evidenced by the massive budget overruns of recent years - has no idea how much money we have. Luckily, the macro miscalculations to date have been on the safe side of the equation.