THE owner of a string of bars and a nightclub in Cork City that have boomed through the recession puts his success down to customer engagement.

UNDER current projections, the Government’s budget deficit will decline to 2.2% of GDP by 2015 if it sticks to the agreed plan to implement adjustment packages of €3.1bn in 2014 and €2bn in 2015.

FOR the first time in half a decade, Ireland now has choices in terms of overall budget strategy.

WHEN economic historians look back at the first couple of decades of the new millennium, it will be characterised as the great recession which presaged the age of austerity.