Taoiseach Brian Cowen doesn't believe he personally was in any way responsible for the devastation caused to the country by the economic policies he pursued as Minister for Finance, by the collapse of the financial system under his watch and the bank guarantee which he gave on 30 September 2008.

Yes, he is very sorry the country has been devastated, he deeply regrets this – as does everyone else in the country, many regretting it far more than he does because they are the ones bearing the pain of the devastation.

Along with a badly negotiated bailout, the Budget puts the greatest burden on those least able to bear it, writes Vincent Browne

Brian Lenihan ended his Budget speech yesterday saying: "There is every reason to be confident about the future of this economy and this country if we only have confidence in ourselves." The problem is that he and the Government have given us every reason not to have confidence in themselves and, as a consequence, in ourselves.

The Programme of Financial Support for Ireland, will be subject to three-month reviews "of conditionality", observance of "quantative performance criteria", plus "respect for EU Council Decisions and Recommendations", writes Vincent Browne.

The real genius of our warped social system is the fact that the rest of us have been persuaded it all makes sense, writes Vincent Browne.

How did we devise a society in which a private, rich elite got control of the country's financial institutions, which made them spectacularly rich?

There is a sense of helplessness. Beyond anger and despair, bewilderment, writes Vincent Browne.

The imminent departure of this wretched government is no longer a consolation - not that its alternative was ever a comfort. It was dismaying for a while that strangers had to rescue us from our own Olympian incompetence. Now, there is no longer dismay - just fear and bafflement.

How can those who took the country to the edge of the abyss bring it back from the brink through negotiations with the EU and IMF?

Saving banks to pursue a low-paid jobs policy is par for the course given the dysfunctionality of our rulers' ideology. By Vincent Browne

We didn't need Ajai Chopra (pictured), our IMF minder, to tell the junta (ie, what is left of the Government) and the mandarins that the "sensible" solution to our crisis was to inflict further misery on those already victimised by the policies of the junta and the mandarins – ie, on those who have lost their jobs.

The spin, the lies, the denials, the delusions , the conceit and the arrogance added insult to ignominy, writes Vincent Browne.

An initial benign suspicion emerged that this was a cognitive impairment caused by the shock of becoming aware of what they had done. But that soon gave way to a realisation that it was what Fianna Fáil does best: tell the people not to believe their own ''lying eyes''.

In truth, it was - and is - part of the deceit that is endemic in our political culture: a denial of the reality that is before us.

Deference to financial moguls and indifference to the people have caused our financial problems, writes Vincent Browne.

If all we had to worry about was this deficit thing, we would be okay, if we were prepared to take the obvious and fair strategy that is beckoning. But the crowd who ravished our fiscal arrangements went one better with the bank guarantee and from that there may be no salvation.

It hardly matters whether we have to be rescued by the EU or the International Monetary Fund in a few months, writes Vincent Browne.

The outcome will be more or less the same - aside from the humiliation of having to acknowledge that we are not capable of running our own country.

The bank bailout will cost us very much more than the €50 billion figure we were told a few weeks ago. The budgetary deficit will get worse, not better; unemployment will increase; there will be more mortgage defaults; the scale of inequality here will widen; Fianna Fáil will survive.

Contentious decisions by John O'Donoghue and Michael McDowell have cost taxpayers many millions of euro, writes Vincent Browne.

The kindness of strangers on which we will rely very soon for the solvency of our State, according to Morgan Kelly writing in the Irish Times on Monday, might extend to running the country – the whole lot of it.