The Governor of the Central Bank, Maurice O'Connell, was very direct. He said that the economy was showing signs of overheating, and that expected growth of 8.25% in 2000 was unsustainable. He expressed himself as 'uneasy' about inflation, up 4.9% in the year to April, said that house price rises were excessive, and drew particular attention to the rise in private credit, up nearly 30% year-on-year compared to a euro-zone average of only 10-11%.

Mr O'Connell expressed the powerlessness felt by many a euro-zone finance minister or central banker: "Remember we can take no action on interest rates or exchange rates, they're gone. We can no longer put a cap on credit either. So you're reduced to things like incomes policy and things like fiscal policy."

No-one quite knows what will happen. Jeremiahs say that a sub-optimal currency area such as the euro-zone will collapse under the strains of accommodating such a disparate bunch of un-linked economies. Optimists must be hoping that a new economic paradigm has been found in which many different types of flower can bloom in the same bed.

Free-market economists delight in the idea that a government can be prevented from interfering in the conduct of its own economy. National euro-zone administrations have lost their power, but it has not been inherited (yet) by any central euro-institution, other than the ECB, which works by nudging the euro-tiller now and then, and moaning quite a lot in public. It would be a delicious irony if it turned out that the control-freaks in Brussels have improved the economic performance of low-tax economies like Ireland by arrogating their economic sovereignty and then finding themselves unable to use it.

Some theorists believe that the severity of economic boom-and-bust cycles is exacerbated by governmental attempts to control them. Here is a marvellous test case: if the Irish government keeps its cool, the market may find its own way out of an impending crash; on the other hand, economic laws may be ineluctable, and the Irish economy may already have bought a one-way ticket to disaster.