Turns out there were 17 billion items posing a far bigger risk to that reputation than a few journalists' questions.

The Financial Times broke the story last month that Dublin-based Ormond Quay, an unregulated conduit through which its owner, German bank Sachsen LB, invested in American subprime mortgages, required a 17bn bail out. That bank's CEO has resigned. The entire German banking sector is in turmoil. In part because of the "sloppily-run pig sty", to quote an expert, that was the Dublin operation.

Ireland has a lightly-regulated environment for international financial services which, along with our very favourable tax regime, we've been marketing to the world.

In a few years we became a world leader in the complex financial engineering alchemy called "securitisation".

This was supposed to be a good-news story for Ireland.

"I am pleased to be able to mark the success of the Irish securitisation sector, " Bertie Ahern said two years ago in a speech launching the Irish Securitisation Forum, a venture of our smartest bankers and the Irish Stock Exchange.

"It has demonstrated just how vibrant the Irish financial industry is and, when it is appropriately encouraged and supported, what it can deliver."

Now that things have turned out differently, everyone from government to the Financial Regulator to the banks to the Irish Stock Exchange are curiously unwilling to talk about the whole mess.

Some commentators have dubbed Dublin's light-touch regulation 'El Paso' . . . a sinister, unsafe place where no one is in charge. But I think that's overegging things. It's absurd and slightly unreal, more Beckett than a Western. And has just as hard a time getting an audience.

Nor is it just Dublin, though being ground zero for the European poster child of this crisis suggests we attracted the subprime end of the subprime debt securitisation trade.

The whole global financial system has been entranced with its own financial alchemy. Lead into gold. Subprime into prime. No-fault investing. Yield without risk. Too good to be true.

Meddling with forces they didn't really understand, furiously bright young lawyers, investment bankers and traders decided that the problem with Enron wasn't that they'd tried too much financial engineering but that they hadn't gone far enough.

Nobody seemed to understand the new financial wizardry. "No one really seems to understand them but the people involved in creating them, " Dan Freed, a senior writer at Investment Dealer's Digest, told the Washington Post. "They assure everybody that everything's going to be okay, and we are forced to believe them."

It makes me think of the sorcerer's apprentice, the old, old story made into a ballad by the German poet Goethe.

Made most popular by Disney in 1940 in the film Fantasia.

Mickey Mouse is left behind by his boss, the old wizard. Mickey is supposed to fetch pails of water. It's drudgery, so he enchants a broomstick to fetch the water for him. Because Mickey's not much good at this trick, the floor gets soaked. He tries to stop the broom, which continues to bring in buckets of water. Finally he tries chopping it in half with an axe.

Each piece becomes another full broomstick, and now they're bringing in twice as much water. It splits again and again, more and more torrents of water filling the wizard's hall. Just as our poor apprentice is about to drown, the old wizard appears and, scowling at his wayward protege, sets the world to rights with a wave of his wand.

We're about neck-deep in the water. The problem is that our Mickey Mouse financial wizards don't have an old sorcerer about to come home and sort it out. The usual suspects . . . government, the Financial Regulators, the Irish Stock Exchange . . . were wearing the mouse ears too.