For a man so vociferous in his defence of Ireland's fiscal sovereignty, Brian Lenihan sure is beginning to sound a lot like a German. You could almost hear the paranoid voice of Frau Merkel creeping out of his mouth in the Dáil last week as he blamed a "speculative attack on one member state" for the collective woes of the eurozone collapsing under the weight of its enormous, homemade budget deficits.

This was just one in a litany of dreary clichés culled from the Frankfurt catechism with which Lenihan larded his speech introducing the second stage of the bill allowing poor Ireland to loan poorer Greece €1.5bn as part of a €110bn European effort to get the embattled Mediterranean nation back on its feet after gorging itself at the global debt buffet.

So we heard a lot about "decisive measures", "a resolute signal", "fundamental financial stability", "solidarity" and ? God bless him ? "conditionality", but very little about how, exactly, Greece will ever pay us back ? except that the Germans will get very "stringent" with them if they don't.

The "evil speculators" canard gets wheeled out time and again to cover for the genuine lack of clarity in EU policies when it comes to eurozone national debt problems. It is also a handy distraction from the fact that "increased coordination" is an EU euphemism for centralised decision-making. In other words, the very surrender of sovereignty Lenihan has been at pains to deny. Just to be clear: when your national budget has to go to Brussels for approval, you are not quite the sovereign nation you once were.

None of this should take away from Lenihan's genuine achievements in inflicting the kind of necessary budgetary pain on Ireland which his colleagues in Greece, Portugal and Spain flinched at until left with absolutely no choice. It is only because Lenihan acted quicker than the others that international commentators have kindly left Ireland out of their denunciations of European profligacy.

But the numbers do not lie. Ireland is paying a huge premium for its borrowings because bond investors know just how bad our public finances really are, notwithstanding attempts to impose more discipline in Merrion Street. We're not being attacked. We're having a reckoning with reality. Patriotic chest-thumping will not change this fact. It won't make Greece any more likely to pay us back, either. But a small surrender of sovereignty means, at least, that we can call on the same kind of bail-out when we need it.