Will Ireland follow Greece into the abyss? Never mind the markets, watch the rugby

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any other business

In the spirit of Richard Ingrams, who as our television critic many years ago reviewed a programme he had not seen but had heard through a hotel-room wall, I felt moved to write about Ireland on the strength of perusing a discarded copy of the Irish Times at a petrol station en route to Manchester for a day at the Tory conference. That tells you how dull I find party conferences, but there are also lessons to be drawn for the UK from the experience of a neighbouring economy whose crisis is both more profound and chronologically more advanced than our own.

It is commonly said that when Greece defaults, Ireland will go down next — but I can report from my pit-stop research and further enquiries that this is by no means the current view from Dublin. A rise in bank deposits in August, the first reversal of a massive outflow of funds that began last autumn, has been hailed by finance minister Michael Noonan as a sign of ‘growing national and international confidence in the Irish banking system’.