Within months of arriving in his new office, the Minister for Finance has been forced into delivering one of the most challenging budgets in the State’s history. Mary Regan profiles the man behind the calculations.

LEST some of our Turkish friends think that young Conor Lenihan’s Dáil outburst was racist, it might be useful to point out that Conor’s late father famously made an equally insensitive remark about our own migrant labourers in the 1980s.