Perhaps because I had been away, Saturday's papers -- the first Irish papers I'd seen for two weeks -- seemed strangely euphoric. The official term for the bank guarantee was "masterstroke", and people seemed to feel we were now out of the woods. And the many long, loving, detailed, blow-by-blow accounts of how the guarantee was struck seemed to indicate that, yes indeed, Macker had been involved.

The blow-by-blow accounts were written in the manner of a taut thriller -- Mission Impossible 4.

The low-key action was presented in epic, dramatic tones. Central to it all seemed to be that the guards had to get John Gormley out of bed because his mobile phone battery was run down, which didn't inspire huge confidence.

People also seemed excited by the notion that Brian Lenihan only had two hours' sleep -- again, not hugely confidence inspiring. How's your decision-making after two hours' sleep? Lenihan was presented as a kind of action man, operating on adrenaline, making senior banking figures wait in the corridor and ringing coalition partners, even if it was after midnight.

And lurking there behind it all was Macker. Gormley, we were told, was well conversant with what was going on with the banks and the economy because he had been getting briefings from Macker. There also seemed to be a suggestion that Macker had been advising Lenihan.

On the face of it, the guarantee did seem to be Macker's big idea. He had explicitly articulated the idea in more than one of his columns in the fortnight leading up to the announcement.

The day after the announcement of the €100k deposit guarantee, he had said it only went half way and that "a full guarantee would have meant full protection for all creditors ... Straight away uncertainty would disappear ... People's fears would be assuaged and, if done properly, it wouldn't cost a penny".

The Sunday before the guarantee, he came out and said it: "The only option is to guarantee 100 per cent of all depositors/creditors in the Irish banking system. If the minister does this ... he will show leadership and be seen as

someone who is coming up with a solution that can be copied all over the world."

He warned of the need for this uniquely Irish solution: "If we take second-hand, discredited ideas from abroad, such as a toxic fund, or, worse still, nationalising a bank, we will fail."

The day after the bailout was announced, Macker, naturally, congratulated the minister for listening to him: "Finance Minister Brian Lenihan has made a wise choice. By coming up with a unique, Irish plan instead of importing a failed solution from abroad, he has instilled confidence in the Irish financial system."

Capital, he said, would now flow into Irish banks, and long term we could expect to see foreign banks move here, set up offices here and create "a banking industry which will thrive". It was -- that word again -- a "masterstroke" and "a practical blueprint for the new financial architecture".

You had to worry for McWilliams that weekend. No-one seemed to know exactly why the guarantee was going to cure everything. Indeed, no-one seemed to know exactly what the guarantee was. Also, given the way things seemed to be worsening and changing on a day-to-day basis, and given that not even the finest minds in government in the US or Europe seemed to have any answers, who would want to be set up as the guy who came up with the answer to everything?

No journalist likes to be held accountable for anything he said. Bad enough that your failed predictions and madcap ideas are out there on the internet for people to find for years to come -- you will find they never Google your correct calls on things, just your boo boos -- imagine if they staked the whole economy on your idea, an idea you had at one point in time, in one particular set of circumstances, when circumstances were changing radically by the day.

Questions & Answers last Monday was more worrying. While the euphoria was wearing off a bit at this point, the mood of the country was still self-congratulatory. The touch of nationalist europhobia we've been toying with since Lisbon, a kind of, "we showed those Krauts and Frogs and Spics", was helping the feelgood factor along too.

But the one thing you realised on Monday night was that no-one really knew anything. Alan Dukes was wise and circumspect as always. But what about Peter Power and Joan Burton? Peter Power seemed like a man who had come on to lap up the congratulations and he didn't seem to want to get drawn into things in too much depth. Joan Burton didn't seem to fully understand the minutiae of the situation -- and, in fairness, not many people do.

What became quite clear at this point was what would become clearer and clearer as the week went on. No-one knew anything. The Government didn't know what happened next, the opposition didn't know, and most commentators didn't know either. In fact, they didn't even know what had happened already.

Except for one man. On Questions & Answers Macker was the only one who knew what should happen next. He had a three-point plan. The bailout had been phase one, and now we needed to send in the Untouchables and clean up the banks. And suddenly you could see how he could have been advising the Government, how in the land of the blind the one-idead man was king. But again, you worried for him.

No more than the rest of us, McWilliams has had several ideas in the last while. I read them all avidly twice a week and found most of them perfectly plausible at the time, because he seems to know what he's on about.

In March, he was saying that what we then innocently thought was a major collapse in bank shares here was a blessing in disguise. In June, he was saying the Irish banks were going to be bought by rich Russians or Arabs. In July, he was saying we should be looking at selling Irish banks to foreign banks. In August, he was saying that bailing out the banks and developers would encourage bad behaviour yet again, and that the Central Bank should swap the banks' huge property liabilities at a massive discount in a massive sale and repurchase operation (that sounds suspiciously like a discredited idea from abroad). I'm not saying any of these were bad ideas at the time. They were all equally plausible on the day that was in it. But we didn't bet the country on them.

While there were other names mentioned in terms of the guarantee idea, from Charlie McCreevy to JP McManus to Dermot Desmond, none of them became synonymous with the guarantee the way Macker did.

In fairness, he never took credit for the idea himself -- but he didn't deny it when other people attributed it to him. Neither did he deny the constant reports that he was continuing to advise Brian Lenihan. If any other businessmen or politicians were behind the masterstroke, they were mainly keeping their heads down.

In the meantime, things were changing hourly, and, as opinion filtered down from the rarefied world of pure economic discussion into the real economy or Main Street or whatever, people's minds were changing hourly too.

Patrick Honohan, Trinity's Professor of International Financial Economics, suggested in the Irish Times on Wednesday that the guarantee was all very well but that what was really needed to get banks lending again was injections of risk capital. Assuring retail depositors with the guarantee was really only a small part of the picture, he said.

Honohan, who has seemed fairly steady through all this, and who has not really sought the limelight, then became the man with the next big idea. Bank shares had gone lower than they were at the time that the Government stepped in with the guarantee, and it seemed that the lending we thought the guarantee promised wasn't happening. So suddenly, the need for recapitalisation became the new big idea and it was repeated ad nauseam by all the "experts".

Even McWilliams himself had moved on by Thursday evening, and he appeared on Prime Time to stress that the real issue to be faced now was recapitalisation. Without serious capitalisation of the banks, he told us, we could not stop a 1929-style crash turning into a Thirties-style recession.

Things will have moved on a lot more by the time you read this. While Britain, the US, the Europeans and the IMF seemed to find it impossible to come up with answers or solutions, we in Ireland are

happy to pounce on one big solution after another.

The all-night urgency of

the bank guarantee was quickly left behind on the side of the road, the urgency gone out of it. The guarantee has become a damp squib and it hasn't even been made law yet. As we moved on to the next thing, which is, at the time of writing, recapitalisation.

Each panacea gives us new comfort. It is simply too mind boggling to think the unthinkable -- that no-one knows what to do.

Largely, our leaders appear to be having what Galbraith, in his study of the Great Crash of 1929 which we've all been made to read where I work, called "no-business meetings". These were important gatherings held by Hoover from which, "No positive action resulted". But, says Galbraith, "At the same time they gave the impression of truly impressive action. The conventions governing the no-business session ensured that there would be no embarrassment arising from the absence of business. Those who attended accepted as a measure of the importance of the meetings the importance of the people attending. The newspapers also co-operated in emphasising the importance of the sessions.

"Some device for simulating action when action is impossible is," says Galbraith, "indispensable in a sound and functioning democracy."

Say what you will about Hoover and the boys, but at least they knew that they knew nothing.