Fasten your seat belts and watch the drill by our two flight attendants, Trixie and Bubbles, because it's about to get rocky. 

The publicly quoted banking model is out of fuel in Ireland. Investment houses, who make decisions about which banks to support and which to ditch, don't expect that the Irish remedy, of part capitalisation, can work. They simply don't believe a word out of the mouths of Irish bankers, Regulators or Government and expect that the scale of bad debts will be such that further large scale capital injections will wipe out shareholders and result in full nationalisation. The scale of the damage caused by Sean Fitzpatrick's cunning, to Minister Brian Lenihan's plan is now clear. 

AIB and Bank of Ireland are unlikely to raise a cent in fresh capital on their own. Very shortly we'll probably own them, competition will be dead in the market and the remaining minnows will get hovered in, especially the Irish Nationwide which, if it was a quoted bank would have failed months ago. An Irish Nationwide guarantee to pay back debt has been downgraded to just one step above junk status. It should be taken over for small change and utterly reformed.

There's been lots of teeth gnashing about Anglo's Sean Fitzpatrick since last week's AGM farce, but if we're honest Fitzpatrick is merely a system of an unreformed set of Irish beliefs that affects a large minority of us:

• Ethics are for classrooms, corporate brochures and oaths are for suckers
• Better the stroke, the fast buck and the stroker
• Telling lies is ok so long as you won't get arrested

How many of us chuckled when the former head of Government told the Tribunal that he won his controversial cash pile on the horses in Britain? Corporate history in Ireland is riddled with scandals, insider strokes and rule breakers, some of them Ireland's richest people and lauded by the media for getting away with it. We've continuously opted for Government by the flawed, distrusting those who campaign for higher standards, believing that progress can't be made without taking short cuts, pulling strokes and appealing to the popular love of roguery. It's appeared a bit of craic. Until now. The bill has arrived. 

Ireland is overpriced by about one third and the economy unlikely to be able to finance our national borrowings following the property bust. We will shortly face the unthinkable – pulling out of the Euro and reviving the Punt. A devaluation of our currency, reducing our standard of living to affordable proportions may be the only conventional route to re-establishing Ireland's financial viability. That would threaten the viability of the Euro and rock the cohesion of the EU to its core because of the precedent it would set for other members like Spain, Greece and Italy who are also deeply in the red. Expect lots of action around the next Lisbon vote where the subtext will be whether or not Europe can come up with an innovative bail out for its fickle star. 

Whatever the strategic road taken, one way or the other we badly need to reform our standards of governance, ethics and transparency at all levels of Government, regulatory, banking and corporate organisations if we are to consign the Galway tent to the dust bin of history and learn anything from this crisis.

There's been a few moments in the recent past when the best thing to do is just to laugh. One was when the Governor of the Central Bank told RTE listeners in the midst of last year's freefall in banking that the top banking minds in the world were working overtime to solve the problem. I nearly ran out of the house screaming. 

Another was yesterday when Taoiseach Brian Cowen, speaking at a safe distance from Japan told us all to get real. I almost threw up on my wasabi sauce – this is coming from the former Minister for Finance and Bertie Ahern acolyte whose policies have caused much of our problems and who, until the evidence was overwhelming denied the scale of Ireland's economic slump and miscalculated the deficit by several billions! 

Course the Taoiseach's comments were a coded address the public sector union chiefs. The game is finally on as these erstwhile partners are forced to admit that both sides are overpaid for what they do, that their pensions need to be capped and, without severe adjustments we're screwed. 

The unions will demand equivalent measures elsewhere, correctly arguing that public pay and pensions alone isn't the panacea. That spells a widening of the tax system and the sale of State assets.  You can also expect measures like hiring grants to encourage employment and business expansion to Ireland but other than that, it's everyone to the lifeboats as we pay a very high price for the economic disaster which was the last Government. Somewhere in the Dept of Finance there's a confidential memo circulating and on it are:

• Property Tax on homes – political hotspot even with tapering measures
• Property Tax definitely on second homes.
• New round of Stealth Taxes- the Taliban at Finance does sneaky taxes expertly.
• Benefit in Kind widens, parking, crèches, maybe even security of tenure.
• Curbs in social benefits and pension tax relief.
• Postponement of non-key capital projects
• Higher income levies for high earners.
• Increase in capital taxes, CGT and CAT.  Corporation tax will be untouched.
• Cuts in Health and Education the two big spending sectors.
• Sale of Port Authorities, Airport Authorities, Bord Gais etc
• Sale of non-essential State lands and properties.
• Breakup and part sale of the ESB.

Still there's two reasons to be cheerful:

• While it's a racing certainty that political and public upheaval will grip Ireland as this lame duck Government fails to recapture the dressing room it lost by bungling since coming into office, the global rallying point is arriving next week as the new US President is inaugurated. Sure, Obama is only human and will make mistakes but his arrival will inject a new fire and confidence into the US economy. While the media focuses on rising unemployment which is a lagging indicator, there are some early indicators that the world's economic engine room will stage a comeback later this year
• Wang Guiying, worried that she's become too much for her nieces and nephews since breaking her leg in 2004 is looking to marry for the first time. What's wonderful about Wang, who lives in the boom city of Chongqing in China, is that she's 107, in the market for a centenarian groom and now scouring old folk's homes to find a suitable candidate. Now that's what I call confidence in the future – life remains exciting!