SPECIAL REPORT DAY 2: Is austerity working - the economic impact

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.

Nowhere more so than Ireland.

From the time the national coffers started looking very shaky in 2008, the first of the hairshirt budgets introduced that year heralded an era of unprecedented belt tightening.