The Economist has a wickedly funny front cover this week. It takes Gericault’s famous picture, The Raft of the Medusa, and Photoshops it to show the wretches on the raft holding Irish and other European flags, and adds, top-left, an RAF rescue helicopter winching in a particularly stolid-looking Angela Merkel to ‘help’.

The imagery becomes even more hilarious when you know the history of the original.

The painting depicts the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today’s Mauritania on July 5, 1816. According to Wikipedia, at least 147 people

were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness. The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain acting under the authority of the recently restored French monarchy.

The references to cannibalism and incompetence are particularly relevant to Fianna Fail, hitherto known as “the political wing of the Irish construction industry”.

LATER: Lorcan Dempsey pointed me at John Banville’s essay in the New York Times:

It is the figures, mainly, that cow us into silence. It is estimated that the banking debt of this nation, which has a population of only 4.6 million, may be substantially more than 100 billion euros. That is 100,000 millions and rising. When we were at school it amused our science teachers to dazzle us with astronomical statistics — so many myriads of light years, so many zillions of stars — but the numbers that we are being forced to count on our too-few fingers now have nothing to do with the fanciful dimensions of outer space. They represent precisely the breadth and depth of the financial hole into which we have toppled headlong.

In the months after September 2008, when the Irish government, after a night-long crisis meeting, was forced to give a guarantee of some 400 billion euros — money we had no hope of ever having — to save the Irish banks from collapse, we used to say that it would fall to our children to pay for our financial folly. Now we know that it will be our children and our children’s children and our children’s children’s children, unto the nth generation, who will bear the burden of our debts, including the “substantial loan” from international lenders that officials now acknowledge is necessary.

There used to be a nice acronym that neatly expressed how the Irish people conceive of themselves: MOPE, that is, Most Oppressed People Ever. For a decade or so, when the Tiger was at its fiercest, we threw off the mantle of oppression, as once we had thrown off what used to be called “the yoke of British rule.” On Wednesday, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced in Brussels that his government stood ready to help Ireland in its hour of need. Oh, bitter day.

All the same, life goes on, somehow. We are learning a new resilience. Humbled as we are, we might even begin to learn social responsibility, a quality in which we have been singularly lacking up to now. Who knows, we may at last recognize the irreplaceable value of public and private honesty. But let us not light the firecrackers just yet.

That’s the headline over an extraordinary Editorial in today’s Irish Times as the paper contemplates the wreckage and humiliation that a corrupt and incompetent Fianna Fail administration has brought on my homeland.

IT MAY seem strange to some that The Irish Times would ask whether this is what the men of 1916 died for: a bailout from the German chancellor with a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor on the side. There is the shame of it all. Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be the masters of our own affairs, we have now surrendered our sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Their representatives ride into Merrion Street today.

Fianna Fáil has sometimes served Ireland very well, sometimes very badly. Even in its worst times, however, it retained some respect for its underlying commitment that the Irish should control their own destinies. It lists among its primary aims the commitment “to maintain the status of Ireland as a sovereign State”. Its founder, Eamon de Valera, in his inaugural address to his new party in 1926, spoke of “the inalienability of national sovereignty” as being fundamental to its beliefs. The Republican Party’s ideals are in tatters now.

…

Irish history makes the loss of that sense of choice all the more shameful. The desire to be a sovereign people runs like a seam through all the struggles of the last 200 years. “Self-determination” is a phrase that echoes from the United Irishmen to the Belfast Agreement. It continues to have a genuine resonance for most Irish people today.

The true ignominy of our current situation is not that our sovereignty has been taken away from us, it is that we ourselves have squandered it. Let us not seek to assuage our sense of shame in the comforting illusion that powerful nations in Europe are conspiring to become our masters. We are, after all, no great prize for any would-be overlord now. No rational European would willingly take on the task of cleaning up the mess we have made. It is the incompetence of the governments we ourselves elected that has so deeply compromised our capacity to make our own decisions.

They did so, let us recall, from a period when Irish sovereignty had never been stronger. Our national debt was negligible. The mass emigration that had mocked our claims to be a people in control of our own destiny was reversed. A genuine act of national self-determination had occurred in 1998 when both parts of the island voted to accept the Belfast Agreement. The sense of failure and inferiority had been banished, we thought, for good.

To drag this State down from those heights and make it again subject to the decisions of others is an achievement that will not soon be forgiven. It must mark, surely, the ignominious end of a failed administration.

Well, yes. But the problem is that there is no knowing what kind of electoral result will follow from this catastrophe. With a bit of luck, Fianna Fail’s run as a serious political party has finally ended, just as — in the end — Italy’s Christian Democrats imploded. But what then? Most of the Irish political establishment is implicated in the disaster that was the Celtic Tiger. One option is that public fury will erupt at the next election in a Tea Party-type explosion of incoherent activism, and Ireland will wind up with an administration rather like that of the Netherlands, in which a party of enraged, contradictory, xenophobic weirdos hold the balance of power.

And then there is the sinister news that Gerry Adams, sensing an opportunity, has decided to resign his seat in the Northern Ireland Assembly to stand for the Dublin parliament.

LATER: In a discussion on RTE Radio this evening, the former Taoiseach, Garret Fitzgerald, made an ironic point — reminding listeners that the revolutionaries whose insurrection in 1916 eventually led to the founding of the Republic were also hoping for German aid!