A vandal throws a brick through the window of Fred Goodwin's Edinburgh home. Security specialists advise senior British bankers to take urgent security precautions. Protesters marching to the G20 meeting this week in London plan to hang effigies of bankers from lampposts, while City workers have been told to pose as "civilians" during the march to avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention.

Here in Ireland, a member of the public jostles and abuses IL&P chairwoman Gillian Bowler while she is out shopping. Bank tellers are verbally abused and spat at. Sinn Féin claims it's time to send in the Criminal Assets Bureau to strip senior bankers of their wealth and property assets.

In the US, the House of Representatives has voted to tax bonuses for those receiving federal funds at a punitive 90%, a measure few thought the normally tax-hating US would ever introduce.

In France this week the government will issue a decree banning companies receiving state aid from handing out stock options and bonuses to any executives.

Malevolence towards bankers is everywhere. Much of it is excessive, crude and often downright nasty. But the public mood is undeniable, the thirst for reform deep. This is one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments when governments get the chance to reform rigid, entrenched institutions such as banks. Reforming them in the right way is obviously the trick, especially when you're trying to get the same institutions to lend money to selected sectors of the economy, most of which are enduring a crippling contraction.

Governments are riding the wave of popular disenchantment with banks, sometimes to good effect, sometimes not. But here in Ireland the government, bizarrely, appears more like a bantamweight than a heavyweight in the fight to reform, fix and restructure the banks.

Its failure to puff its chest out and do the right thing appears to come from an almost obsessive desire not to disquiet the bond market, which in the past year has effectively become a giant Shylock to the Irish exchequer.

The case of Michael Fingleton and his €1m "pre-contracted inventive" bonus was the most clear example of how the government has allowed its priorities to be set by bond strategists in London, Paris and Frankfurt.

The same almost blind devotion to keeping bond-holders satisfied, while understandable in a government that is desperate to retain access to the capital markets, should not stop the government cleansing the banking sector of all unpleasant legacies. A chief executive of a bank getting a €1m bonus after running up huge lending exposures falls into that category.

Asked last week why the government could not cajole Fingleton to return the bonus or have it clawed back in some way, Brian Lenihan replied that it might impact on international market perceptions of Irish banking.

To threaten Fingleton with removal of Irish Nationwide's state guarantee, for example, could raise alarm in the bond market, suggested the minister.

Maybe he is right, but one has to doubt it. The fortunes of Irish Nationwide barely register as a speck internationally, never mind the impact of its rise or fall here in Ireland.

The building society is the smallest domestically-owned lender in Ireland; even fellow microlender EBS has a larger balance sheet. The bond market, if it ever gave a moment's notice to of Irish Nationwide, would probably rejoice at the society getting new management.

The government has been trying to dress up Irish Nationwide, in terms of scale and "systemic" importance, as some kind of Irish Lehman Brothers. But nobody sees it that way at home or abroad. The building society owes the bond market only €7bn in debts, a tiny amount for a bank in Ireland or anywhere else. If ever an institution was definitely not "too big to fail" or "too big to save", it is Irish Nationwide.

If there is one lender in Ireland where the government has all the leverage and all the cards in its hand, it is Irish Nationwide. But for some reason, inexplicable to many, it declined to play its hand too forcefully.

Instead Fingleton made the crucial move himself, citing a 24-hour media siege outside his home. He didn't sound like a very scared man.