Aside from baying in corporate boxes at their national rugger teams, the movers and shakers in the financial industry aren’t the types to manifest patriotic fervour. In this interconnected, flattened and otherwise mangled world, to tether yourself too closely to the fate of a single nation is to risk narrowing your portfolio. Those whose careers consist of making money using other people’s money are united by their ruthless internationalism–a Brotherhood of Mammon.

Or so I thought.

But according to a recent column-filling tidbit in the Sunday Indo, when the going gets the tough, the rich in Ireland are just as likely to rail against perfidious Albion as a street hawker of An Phoblacht.

“THE latest theory doing the rounds in some property and banking circles is that London hedge fund boys are having an old fashioned crack at the Mick. According to the theory, the City boys, sick of Paddy buying up key London landmarks, have seen an opportunity to put the boot in and short Irish bank shares. The result is that Anglo Irish, a bank which may announce up to 20 per cent earnings growth later this month, is trading on eight times p/e. If you believe it, it makes them a buy.”

It’s a tempting fantasy–a group of double-barrelled hedge fund types meet for cocktails at the Drones Club: they decide to put the maximization of profits and investors’ interests to one side for the time being–because it’s time for a spot of old-fashioned paddybashing!

I guess conjuring up such asinine conspiracies is preferable to thinking seriously about what slumping Irish shares say about the wider economy’s darkening prospects.