November 14, 2013.

Ireland Plans 'Clean Exit' From Bailout Program

'Then get away from me as quick as you can."

DUBLIN----Ireland's government will make a clean exit from its three-year international bailout in the coming weeks without recourse to a precautionary line of credit, and will work closely with Germany to ensure the country makes a strong recovery from its debt crisis, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said Thursday.

She need not have told him that. But for the moment they could not extricate themselves from the crowd. The trucks were still filing past, the people still insatiably gaping. At the start there had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and had soon stopped. The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. The round Mogol faces had given way to faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. From over scrubby cheekbones eyes looked into Winston's, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing to an end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound together. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze.

Dublin had long debated whether it would need a credit line from the International Monetary Fund and the euro zone to safeguard against potential setbacks after it draws down the last of its bailout loans, and now believes that it doesn't need a safety net to secure full access to debt markets from 2014, Mr. Kenny told lawmakers in a special sitting of the Irish parliament.

It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight. In the same instant it occurred to him that he did not know what colour the girl's eyes were. They were probably brown, but people with dark hair sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.

"This is the right decision for Ireland, and now is the right time to take this decision," he said. "This is the latest in a series of steps to return Ireland to normal economic, budgetary and funding conditions. Like most other sovereign euro zone countries, from 2014 we will be in a position to fund ourselves normally on the markets."