As the Guardian notes this morning:

Ireland reluctantly began four years of tax rises and brutal cuts to social welfare after its parliament narrowly passed the harshest budget in the Republic's history.

As angry protests raged outside the D?°il, the country's finance minister Brian Lenihan announced that child benefit would be slashed, more workers taken into the tax bracket and petrol prices raised to save €6bn (£5bn) in the forthcoming year.

But as Michael Burke asks (also in the Guardian):

The Dublin government has yet to explain why repeating the policy will yield a different result this time — the underlying deficit having almost doubled following its desolation of the public sector. But the same question is posed to Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Osborne, and for that matter too, Alan Johnson and his slightly slower, perhaps more anguished, cuts.

British political leaders, like their co-thinkers in Dublin, have no explanation as to how cuts led to a wider deficit.

That’s the core question.

I don’t think there is an answer — because it won’t work this time either. It can’t. Only Keynesian reflation will do that.