The old adage that creditors are blessed with better memories than debtors seems highly relevant to corporate Ireland at present. All around the Irish stock exchange Irish companies are trying to find ways to deal with debt mountains accumulated in the tiger years.

You can try and stretch the debt out (Smurfit Kappa); you can throw yourself at the mercy of your bankers (McInerney); you can buy out your creditors at discounted prices (Bank of Ireland); you can try and restructure the debt mountain via tortuous negotiations (Independent News & Media); or you can simply try and make it someone else's problem (Eircom).

If you are a car company in the United States of course you can simply ask President Barack Obama to subject your creditors to crippling discounts and leave them fretting in the courts for years.

Ireland's highly geared companies are fighting on all fronts these days to escape the creditor's trap door.

Based on what has happened to IN&M and Smurfit Kappa it would seem far easier to cut a deal over bank debt, than bond debt.

Banks are in the business of writing down loans these days and they usually have governments behind them prepared, at the taxpayer's expense, to mop up the mess.

In contrast holders of corporate bonds, even those at the subordinated level, like to play hard ball, especially as many of them represent hedge funds who've promised their well-heeled clients a tasty return, not a value destroying debt restructure.

For the last decade Ireland's biggest companies have eschewed plain old bank borrowings, happy instead to plunge into the bond market. The current attempts to tame the bond lenders by a plethora of Irish companies suggests they may have different preferred lenders in future.