Budget 2020: Brexit threat defines the ground rules

Despite Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s weekend bullishness when he said that a record 2.3m people are at work and that the unemployment rate stands at 5% and continues to fall, today’s budget, one of the tightly choreographed melodramas of the political year, might be described as a cross between one of Venice’s masked balls and a dull episode of a TV blind date exploitation fest.

Most people at a masked ball know who everyone else is despite the faux mystery contrived to facilitate something beyond the everyday, maybe a frisson of sexual fantasy.