Repayment of bailout loans reminder of a lost high point in Anglo-Irish relations 

“We are not seeking to make a buck out of this, we are seeking to help our friend,” Osborne told the House of Commons in 2010 even before details of how the loan would work had been hammered out.

Fears that a full Irish economic collapse would sink UK banks was undoubtedly a factor too, but at a time when Ireland had few friends and less cash, it was still a welcome intervention.

At the time, Dublin negotiators were more likely to find themselves slogging through punishing late night EU summits in Brussels punctured by lectures on the inadequacies of Portugal, Ireland and Greece, dubbed the PIGs, from the likes of Olli Rehn, Jean-Claude Trichet and Wolfgang Schäuble.

With Ireland’s stock across Europe on a high these days it is easy too to forget that in the Spring of 2011 as Enda Kenny took office as Taoiseach, he was faced with a public dressing down from Angela Merkel who had adopted a punitive approach to the Irish debt crisis negotiations and played to a populist anti-bailout narrative in her own country by insisting the then 5.8pc punitive interest rates on the EU bailout could not be altered. Members of the German federal parliament saw that year’s Irish budget before the Dáil.

In contrast, under the affable Cameron, the UK government diplomatically avoided taking a potentially humiliating role in overseeing the bailout, despite contributing direct funds and billions to underpin the EU’s temporary bailout fund.

Even if keeping the lights on in Ulster Bank and maintaining trade were factors in the Cameron government signing off on the loan, they did it at a politically tough time as Britain entered its own period of austerity, albeit mild compared to what was endured here. Cameron was also under constant attack from Eurosceptics in his own party ranks.

Instead, David Cameron’s Irish focus that Spring was on Queen Elizabeth’s state visit to Ireland. In May, Cameron and much of his cabinet accompanied the Queen on the first state visit by a British monarch in a trip that included visiting the Garden of Remembrance and the site of the Bloody Sunday massacre at Croke Park.

The state visit was a significant diplomatic success and a rare good news story for both Cameron’s government and the new Fine Gael-Labour coalition.

It appeared to herald a new era of normalisation and harmonisation between both countries matched financially by Cameron and Osborne’s approach to their bailout loans.

The UK, along with Sweden and Denmark who made smaller contributions, set their interest rates to match the EU rate but were open early to cutting the rate charged to just tiny margin over Britain’s own borrowing costs.

Germany and Brussels eventually gave in to Mr Kenny’s calls to renegotiate the interest rate on the bailout, a change that saved Irish taxpayers around €10bn and arguably shifted the dial in favour of actually getting out of the Troika’s clutches without a second rescue package.

Including the UK debt, four of the six loans that made up the original bailout package have now been repaid. The IMF and Swedish and Danish loans were repaid early, refinanced by debt from the bond market.

Roughly €40bn owned to the EU rescue fund – the EFSF and EFSM still have years, even decades to run, but now have easy-to-manage low interest rates.

Even so, the national debt has increased, even as the individual elements of the bailout were paid back. The debt of €215bn in 2012, at the peak of the euro crisis, is expected to hit around €241bn this year.

That’s not all that’s changed in the last decade. There’s simply no comparison in the spiky personal relations between Boris Johnson and Mícheál Martin, or Johnson and Leo Varadkar to the clubbable Cameron-Kenny era.

The UK under Johnson is taking an increasingly jingoistic cultural turn and has embarked on a chaotic and unpredictable economic trajectory, but Ireland has changed too. The political mood here is now inflected with a bit of EU triumphalist swagger over Brexit and a more strident nationalistic tone around unification on the other.

Paying back the UK loans in full and on time is another exampleof how far we’ve come since the dark days of the crisis, but it is also a reminder that we have come tothe end of unique era of understanding and cooperation on these islands.