It may have been founded by an Irishman, Brendan Bracken, but the modern Financial Times has a problem, an adjectival problem. After almost six months of unrelenting bleak economic news concerning Ireland, the newspaper is running out of compelling adjectives to describe our economic malaise.

On St Patrick's Day the financial title said "the mood in Ireland is sombre". Last Thursday its leader writer wrote: "Celtic Tiger is an endangered species". In the most wounding piece of commentary, from a government point of view at least, the paper said on Wednesday that Ireland had little chance of re-invigorating its export-led economy. Ireland may "only succeed in exporting its best hope of recovery: its talent", the FT's famous Lex column stated.

This analysis incensed government representatives and their advisers who, shortly before St Patrick's Day, sat down with the Financial Times editorial board to try to convince them that Ireland was not actually taking its last financial breath.

The charm offensive seems to have had little tangible effect. While the government's aim is to halt a worrying deterioration in credit perceptions of Ireland, the wider battle has been to reassure British financial opinion that the economy is not in an IMF waiting-room.

So far these efforts have failed spectacularly. Among newspapers, the broadsheet press is hostile to Ireland's story, including last week's budget. As highlighted recently in this newspaper, the popular end of the British newspaper market is even more hostile, with the Mail on Sunday cautioning its readers to avoid depositing money with Irish banks, with or without a government guarantee.

Government attempts, via personal appearances and diplomatic overtures, have failed to staunch the flow of negative comment about Irish economic prospects. Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation have also given the government perspective very little hearing, with Simon Johnston, once of the IMF, regularly quoted as an authority on Irish solvency. One magazine article said Ireland was once a "beer-soaked backwater".

Financial news wires have also been unusually fevered about what might happen here. US news service Bloomberg, for example, recently carried a story on its chief UK list with a headline concerning a possible "bailout" of Ireland, and the imminence of a bailout was the first topic broached with finance minister Brian Lenihan last week when he appeared on the US company's television service.

Bloomberg's editor-in-chief and veteran bond reporter, Matt Winkler, also recently met Lenihan to talk about the Irish economy. Last week the organisation had three stories running all at the same time about the country's economic woes.

However the sharpest criticisms of Irish economic performance and that of the domestic banks are to be found in the popular and mid-market press. Take this as an example, from the Mail on Sunday, dated 9 April and headlined, 'How Ireland became an economic basket case... and the lessons for Britain'.

The author's opening paragraph remarked that Ireland had "transformed itself from a priest-dominated, sclerotic, agrarian economy to a place where some of the most powerful companies in the world chose to make their headquarters". But there was the sting: "There is now a genuine possibility that this beautiful country could also go bankrupt."

The reasons for this kind of coverage are three-fold. One is that economic statistics don't lie. The public finances are in disastrous shape. Ireland has the largest budget deficit in the whole of Europe. Apart from Spain it has the highest unemployment rate and is recovering from the second-highest rise in house prices in the world after South Africa. There is no way to put a gloss on that.

As Churchill once said: " The truth is incontrovertible; malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is."

The second reason is that Ireland is relying on ambassadors and diplomatic staff to get its message out that the country is open for business and is not the next Iceland. Unfortunately, diplomatic approaches are unlikely to sway British economic and financial writers and broadcasters.

The third and less obvious reason for this press coverage has to do with currencies. Sterling has fallen by an extraordinary 28% against the dollar in the year to March.

This is a huge devaluation of the British pound. If it happened under ex-prime minister Harold Wilson, he would have been ejected from office. But now the UK economy is being helped by the devaluation and its exporters are overjoyed. The fact that Britain imports most of its goods does not seem to have registered.

But instead of reflecting on the effective collapse of sterling against other major global currencies, many commentators in the British press are more interested in obsessing over the fate of the euro and how it has apparently left smaller countries such as Ireland more exposed. This, of course, is debatable.

How would Ireland's banks be positioned today if they were paying back dollar and sterling bond-holders in a collapsing Irish pound? Not a thought worth lingering over.

It seems curious that Ireland has even garnered such negative publicity in Britain when one considers that Ireland makes up just over 1% of eurozone GDP. One explanation for this is that certain europhobe commentators see in Ireland's economic slump the proof they needed that the euro is a doomed project and that countries should hold onto their own native currency, such as, uh, sterling, for instance.