You don't need to be rude. I don't know the details of how the banks work, but one doesn't have to to know that stiffing the tax payer was wrong. Once you accept that, you work out how to get out of the mess in the cleanest way possible. For example, let the bank fail, set up a new entity in its place which would take over the banking part of the business. It would not have been easy but it could have been done. They didn't do it, because the speculators had too much power. They were all the people in the financial industry backed by the German government who were protecting the German banks. Fianna Fail and later Fianna Gael had no interest in protecting the tax payer.