JIM POWER: Debt burden will need to be eased for us to recover

The annual budget has always attracted considerable attention in Irish popular discourse, but the attention devoted to Budget 2013 has reached a whole new level and has been speculated about almost since the minister for finance sat down after his budget speech a year ago.

This state of affairs is not terribly surprising, as the task of taking €3.5bn out of a struggling economy that has seen a total fiscal adjustment of around €24.5bn between 2008 and 2012 was never going to be easy or painless, and so it has proven.

Unfortunately, this persistent speculation has had a detrimental impact on confidence levels in the economy and has hampered consumer demand and business investment intentions.