Ireland has swallowed a bitter austerity pill since receiving a bail-out from the European Union and International Monetary Fund in November 2010.
Last Thursday it got its reward. Investors welcomed its long-awaited return to capital markets funding with an impressive turn-out.
They snapped up more than €5bn of debt due in 2017 and 2020 through a bond sale and a bond switch on Thursday. Investors took just shy of €4bn of a new 5.5% October 2017 line at a yield of 5.9% and just over €1.3bn of the existing 5% October 2020 at a yield of 6.1%.
But the cheer this will bring should not distract from the dire economic path many countries in Europe are on.
This was a week, remember, when even the UK — which has been regarded as something of a haven — recorded a much worse than expected drop in GDP. Economic performance in Spain also continues to underwhelm.
Spain, with its elephantine levels of unemployment and worsening economic outlook, needs growth measures, not austerity, if it is to have any hope of staving off a collapse in the long term.
In the short term it can only be hoped that ECB President Draghi will keep to his word to stand by the euro. And for many in the market, that means protecting Bonos yields through the use of the Securities Markets Programme (SMP) at the very least.
It has its limitations — if bondholders take the opportunity to dump their bonds, then it's hard to see it as very useful. For that reason, others advocate a more substantial role for the two bailout vehicles, the EFSF and the ESM. After all, they are both allowed to buy bonds in the primary market, although many argue they would need more funds to be able to so in the kind of size that would make a difference.
All of which means that what the ECB announces this week on the both the SMP and longer term measures could not be of greater importance. But even if it relaxes its stance, it can only do such much.
It is growth policies, rather than a series of sticking plaster fixes, that will ultimately make the difference. Such policies are a difficult sell to voters in core Europe. But to go on forcing through austerity without offering a helping hand is going to end in tears.