The sovereign debts markets as tracked for many months by the Sunday Tribune have long given up on Ireland. The strategy of Berlin and Paris now is to stop Portugal being the next domino to be locked out of bond debt markets because they have given up on saving Ireland from a bailout, say senior market players.

French and German taxpayers will in time underwrite our sovereign bailout but the cost will be most certainly loaded on Ireland. Irish citizens will have to pay the rent on the building of the bailout folk, their salaries and even the cost of the computers provided by the European Investment Bank that will track the new bailout bonds. But it remains unclear which bailout fund Ireland will be forced to tap.

Counting Klaus Regling's €440bn bailout in Luxembourg for eurozone countries, there are three European and IMF bailout pots that Ireland could tap when the state is down to its last €1bn. It may be that Ireland taps a bit from all three because the scale of our debts, though big enough to rattle global financial markets, is still small enough.

Regling's €440bn European Financial Stability Facility is already well known. The IMF has a big say in Regling's facility too because it has subscribed for about a third of the shares of the Luxembourg company. There is also the exclusively European €60bn fund that's available in a European Commission bailout pot and, separately, cash from the IMF pot in Washington.

The IMF is intimately involved in two of the bailout cash options facing Ireland. Which pot Ireland draws from will of course not be decided by the government but by the finance ministers of Germany and France. In short, US officials from the IMF will also be setting up home in Merrion Street no matter which pot Ireland draws from.