Via RTE, Ireland has agreed to be bailed out after a week of will they, won’t they speculation :

Taoiseach Brian Cowen, has confirmed that a major financial assistance plan for Ireland has been agreed with the EU.

Government statement on application

Mr Cowen said the financial assistance plan has been agreed with the EU.

He said the terms of the funding being sought would be the subject of negotiations and would be used to put the Irish banks system back on its own two feet and to address the current deficit.

Income tax levels would be returned to 2006 levels he said.

He told a press conference in Dublin tonight that the solidarity that has been shown to Ireland by other countries should also be shown in Ireland.

Mr Cowen also said that corporate tax rates would not be changed as part of this deal.

The Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, said Europe stood fully with Ireland in relation to the eurozone.

Mr Lenihan repeated the figure involved would not reach €100bn and not all of the money on offer would be drawn down.

He said the period of the loan had not been determined, although normal programmes applied over three years.

Mr Lenihan said our options had been narrowly circumscribed since 2008 and the Government had acted appropriately.

He said a clear option now was to look at bank assets – the vast part of the banks now being in public ownership – and to see what assets could be disposed of.

How long now for Portugal to be added to the list of propped up states?

Not for long if the following piece from ZeroHedge has any truth behind it :

With Ireland now a lost cause, the next country which will see its bond yields surge to new records is Portugal. And just so vigilantes don’t miss the hint, the Portuguese opposition party has stated that the country’s budget deficit and public debt are “higher than those reported by the government.” The claim is that Portuguese debt is about 30% higher than claimed by official statistics: instead of 82% of GDP, it is actually 112%. With bankrupt Greece having lied about virtually every aspect of its comatose economy, it is not as easy to dismiss the announcement as merely political bickering, and is sure to leads to at least a modest double digit basis point jump in Portuguese spreads. And once Portugal is rescued, just after New Year’s, then it will be time for those last two countries of the peripheral block: Italy and Spain. And after them, it’s the core’s turn.

From Reuters:

Pedro Passos Coelho told a meeting of his Social Democratic Party items like state-run companies’ debts were not included in the overall public debt, which the government puts at 82 percent of gross domestic product this year.

He said that the “true” total public debt stood as high as 112 percent of GDP, while the budget deficit should be at 9.5 percent of GDP, far above the minority Socialist government’s target of 7.3 percent for the end of the year.

“The state has for many years been removing from the budget a series of activities, which has made a large part of our numbers fictitious,” he said in televised remarks.

Government officials were not immediately available for comment. They have previously denied similar allegations by smaller opposition parties, saying that the statistical and budget data were regularly monitored by Brussels.

It is all getting rather silly with countries borrowing money to pay for other countries borrowings – the Australian sketch show clip below seems to be getting more and more accurate by the day :
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