The international press has offered an unconvinced reaction to the Government's plans to stabilise the banking system - saying the proposals would buy Ireland time but may not address wider debt problems.
Many newspapers suggested the State may eventually be forced to tap into the European Financial Stability Fund to access cheaper borrowing to help it overcome the banking crisis, with the Daily Telegraph suggesting this option represented a "beacon of hope" to help the State secure cheaper borrowing.
The Telegraph said the Irish outlay on bailing out the banks made the UK's final bill of £70billion seem "a relative bargain".
It also acknowledged that Ireland was quick to don a hair-shirt to fix the mess by cutting spending and increasing taxes and that transparency on the scale of the debts "seems to have done the trick" with bond yields falling.
Under the headline "Irish crisis shakes Europe", the Wall Street Journal said "convulsions" in Dublin were adding to concerns that Ireland may go the way of Greece and eventually require a bailout from the EU or International Monetary Fund.
It said the Anglo figures underscored "Ireland's new and unwanted status as the center of Europe's continuing financial turmoil" and that the cost of bailing out the banks could be up to a third of the country's economic output for 2009.
The Guardian ran a stark editorial under the headline "Ireland: Busted". It said Ireland had experienced the deepest and swiftest contraction of any western country since the Great Depression and with property prices down 40 per cent "the country will soon hold the dubious honour of hosting the biggest property bubble and bust in modern history".
"When financiers joked in 2008 that the only difference between bankrupt Iceland and hard-up Ireland was one letter and a few days, they got it wrong - the mess the Emerald Isle is now in is so much worse," it says.
The Financial Times was slightly more upbeat in its assessment of the situation here. It said that by finally allowing the public an inkling "of the depth of the pit that Anglo Irish is, the Irish government has taken a step - a small one, and not before time - towards solving Ireland's banking crisis".
It said the plan finalised the tab the public would pick up "for the wild speculation and cronyism that passed for lending at Anglo... These stunning numbers should not be seen as future losses but as an attempt at settling losses already incurred."
The FT said this attempt was almost successful and that harsh stress tests made it unlikely that the Anglo losses would exceed the final capital injection.
The London Times ran a cartoon featuring a pot of gold and an unhappy leprechaun holding an IOU slip. It also said Europe had hailed Ireland's "€45 billion plan to shore up its ailing banks".
