The fact Denis Casey, chief executive of Irish Life & Permanent, was prepared to defend the €400bn guarantee scheme on his own in an extremely hostile environment was a credit to the man, in a week when many of his banking colleagues seemed to go wobbly kneed.

Some of the hostility generated by Brian Lenihan's announcement was crude and self-serving. Paul Gogarty, a Green Party TD, did little to lift the level of debate by calling members of the banking industry "scum'' during the Dáil debate. He then obediently trooped into the voting lobby to support the legislation anyway.

However the deep reluctance of the banking executives to rationalise last week's events in public speaks volumes about who the winners were from the government announcement.

In the last two weeks, bank executives at several institutions were facing grim futures. Several of them were facing the very real prospect of their institutions going into bankruptcy; several of them were looking at the very real prospect of their institutions being involved in forced sales with their chief rivals. Most disconcertingly to many of them, they were looking at the prospect of being out of a job and possibly never again being involved in Irish banking at a high level.

By Tuesday morning this bleak vista was wiped away and by lunchtime their shares prices were surging. A rush of deposits from Britain swelled their coffers and some of the cheerleaders for the guarantee scheme were even talking about it turning around the whole of the Irish economy. The sour reaction of British politicans like Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown only seemed to confirm the rightness of the government's intervention in the eyes of these people.

Those looking at the week's events more dispassionately have little option but to accept the bona fides of the Central Bank, the Financial Regulator and the minister for finance when they say the Irish banking system was truly on the brink of collapse last Monday night because of short-term liquidity issues. The bona fides are accepted with a heavy heart, though.

Why are all three parties not providing more detail and simple information about what precisely was happening earlier last week? When a state guarantee amounts to over €400bn the requirements for disclosure to the citizenry about the financial crisis increase hugely and the government have convinced very few people on this score.

More crucially why did the government drop the ball in relation to making the banks cough up decent concessions that could ultimately help to improve the banking sector here in the long term? The government's initial statement (all four paragraphs of it) did not even include the most cursory mention of what the banks would do in exchange for this unprecedented guarantee.

It talked about charging the banks for the use of the guarantee, but there was nothing there about lending guidelines for the future, nothing about executive pay, nothing about asset sales, nothing about dividends, nothing about takeovers or consolidation.

This weekend the government is starting to talk about some of these things but they need to move fast and decisively to tie down the details. My sense is that Irish business people and taxpayers have, through gritted teeth, given lukewarm support to this guarantee scheme, but now they want the minister to literally show them the money, show them that this is a fair exchange between two contracting parties.

The most damning verdict on the guarantee came in the Financial Times which summed up the government's proposals last week by saying the scheme left the government with all of the risk and none of the reward.

Obviously the government is going to go hunting for the reward this week, but there is an unsettling sense of bolting horses. There is also a far more worrying sense that the guarantee scheme is simply a €400bn sticking plaster. The fact that other EU countries like France and Greece are in the process of adopting similar models does not alter the fact that Irish banking is in a fight for its very survival and within a year, maybe even a few months, several Irish banks will not be with us in their current guise.

Last week's guarantee scheme puts certain institutions on a life-support machine, but does nothing to cure the underlying maladies.

These include a huge reliance on wholesale funding (this newspaper reported recently that loan-to-deposit ratios in Ireland are among the highest in the world), falling share prices, unsustainable dividends,
rising property-related bad debts,
lack of capital and in the case of
some institutions, a leadership vacuum.

The feelgood factor from Tuesday's intervention lasted barely the week. By Friday Irish Nationwide was embarrassed (god knows why) for seeking deposits in the UK and Sean Fitzpatrick's recent share purchases were under investigation.

Despite everything that happened last week, Citibank, once the largest bank in the world, was still telling its clients to sell Anglo Irish Bank's shares on Friday. It envisages Anglo posting a whopping loss of €165m by 2010 and not paying any cash dividend at all in future years, reduced instead to just paying scrip.

The banks have not helped their case in any of this. They should be husbanding cash, looking at asset sales and trying to prompt consolidation from their own industry.

Last week Brian Lenihan called the six lenders he covered in the guarantee scheme "orphans'' in stormy international seas. But what he will soon realise is that even orphans sometimes have to grow up and fend for themselves.