There’s been a lot said about Ireland’s money woes of late and with good reason as the situation involves questioning the very future of the Euro as a going concern and the prospects of the continent’s long-term recovery.

I have never indulged in the near-unanimous Peston-bashing that goes on out there in the big, bad world as I have a strong regard for the BBC’s business reporter and thoroughly enjoy his blog but I have to say he has quoted some quite odd numbers in his latest blog.

Which British banks are at risk? Well according to new research by Morgan Stanley, total lending to Ireland’s private and public sectors is equivalent to 92.3% of the net assets of Denmark’s Danske Bank, 89.5% of Royal Bank of Scotland’s net assets, 60.2% of Lloyds’ net assets and 15.9% of Barclays’ net assets. Those figures exclude bank-to-bank lending, but they indicate how exposed Britain’s banks are to Ireland’s woes (RBS is most exposed, as the owner of a substantial Irish bank, Ulster Bank).

Looks worrying doesn’t it, 89.5% of RBS’ assets? No wonder Osborne is ploughing in to help Ireland out, we can’t bring RBS down with the Irish. Why is one of Britain’s banks so heavily linked in with Ireland anyway? Is it something to do with the Six Nations? Well, the key distinction is that this is net assets rather than just plain old assets. That 89.5% only applies to the difference between RBS’ total assets less its total liabilities and, well, after the whirlwind few years that the Bank has had who knows what that number could be.

If RBS has total assets of £300bn and liabilities of £299.9bn, then RBS is exposed to a paltry £89.5m. If liabilities are £100bn then RBS is exposed to £179bn. In other words, that 89.5% really doesn’t tell us anything in the absence of absolute figures which we clearly don’t have available. I suspect mind games are at play here and we’re being coerced into swallowing our medicine. What’s Morgan Stanley’s exposure to Ireland, I wonder?

Of course, some of Britain’s bailout money will presumably go towards the aforementioned Ulster Bank which is 100% owned by RBS. So, if you want to see it that way, this is actually (in part) a British Government bailing out a British company, just doing it on the scenic route via Ireland. (And I hope it went up the West coast, beautiful it is there)

We are not lending to Ireland to help Ireland out, we are lending to Ireland to save our own skin. I would have thought that the Tory backbenchers and Nigel Farage’s of this world would be at the forefront of such an approach since Osborne’s is a Britain-first policy, but it seems they’ve decided otherwise.

Think about it this way, if Ireland was on the other side of the world, if this was New Zealand or Paraguay facing financial meltdown, would Britain altruistically ride to its rescue? Unlikely. ‘Not my problem guv’ we would probably collectively say or ‘no spare change mate’ even, shamefully if so.

The overriding message is that it is the banks that continue to be the drag on the recovery, not to mention the initial problem in all of this. Osborne’s actions in the short term should not be difficult to sell politically as it is self-interest at stake, whatever way you want to look at the Net Assets of the entities involved.

The real political problem for the politicians is the perception that the Banks have collectively got away scot-free with causing so much pain. One solution, to turn RBS into some sort of mutual Green bank, isn’t one that should be looked down on too disdainfully.