Contributor(s): Patrick Honohan | After a long run of seeming prosperity, the financial crisis left Ireland’s banks more under water and its public and private balance sheets in greater disarray than in most other Western European countries. Since then, the painful processes of bank restructuring and fiscal adjustment, partly under the protection of an IMF-EU financial support arrangement, have revealed much about the domestic and international political economy of debt and austerity. Patrick Honohan was appointed Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland in 2009. Prior to this, he worked at the World Bank and the IMF, and was economics advisor to the Irish government. He is an alumnus of LSE. Charles Bean is a member of the Department of Economics at LSE, and the Centre for Macroeconomics. He was Deputy Governor for Monetary Policy at the Bank of England from 2008-14, and Chief Economist at the Bank of England from 2000 to 2008. The Department of Economics at LSE (@LSEEcon) is one of the largest economics departments in the world. Its size ensures that all areas of economics are strongly represented in both research and teaching. The Centre For Macroeconomics (@CFMUK) brings together world-class experts to carry out pioneering research on the global economic crisis and to help design policies that alleviate it.