Remember the Charlie McCreevy budgets? McCreevy was minister for finance from 1997 to 2004, when the economy went through its most spectacular growth. Year after year he would cut taxes and increase spending, using the tax revenue from a booming economy to stuff more cash into voters’ pockets while showering money on public services and public servants. The headlines wrote themselves: “Champagne Charlie”. “Good-time Charlie”. “Charlie and the budget bonanza”.

Budget day occupies a central place in the political calendar. People know that what politicians say on budget day affects their daily lives, so they pay attention to it. That means next Tuesday will be one of the few times in the year that many people who don’t follow every twist of political life tune in to what politicians are saying. Bookies offer odds on the colour of the Minister for Finance’s tie.

When McCreevy was minister public spending doubled, from €20 billion to €40 billion. Hundreds of thousands of people were taken out of the tax net, and universal welfare payments, such as pensions, child benefit and a galaxy of allowances and payments, extended the State’s munificence to all sectors of society.

When McCreevy was packed off to Brussels – ironically, for reluctance to continue spending after the 2002 election – his successor Brian Cowen took up the task with some gusto. The money continued to flow.

Politically, it worked like a dream. Bertie Ahern won three elections in a row, twice re-elected on the back of the giveaway budgets of his finance ministers. Then it stopped working.

With almost incomprehensible abruptness budget day ceased to be a political carnival and became an instrument of fear for most people. To Brian Lenihan fell the task of dealing with the new economic reality and communicating to a restive public that things had changed for the worse.

Lenihan’s budgets were savage, hiking taxes and slashing spending across government. Separately, he monstered public-sector pay, first through the pension levy and then through straight pay cuts. Capital spending on schools, hospitals and infrastructure shuddered almost to a halt.

There were two budgets in 2009, one harsher than the next. The following year Lenihan introduced measures designed to cut spending and increase taxes by €6 billion. And still it wasn’t enough.

Lenihan's successor was Michael Noonan, of Fine Gael. Brendan Howlin, of the Labour Party, assumed responsibility for public expenditure as head of a new department carved out of Finance.

If McCreevy’s budgets seem like a distant memory, few can forget Lenihan’s, or Noonan and Howlin’s. In 2011, 2012 and 2013 Noonan and Howlin continued to scythe away at public-spending budgets while loading new charges and taxes on a public now groaning under the weight of austerity.

By the end of 2014 the fiscal position, and the economy, had recovered sufficiently for the Fine Gael-Labour coalition to gamble on a mildly expansionary budget for the following year.

It wasn’t quite “the end of austerity”; rather, it was the end of austerity getting worse. The government had planned to take a further €2 billion in spending cuts and tax increases but instead produced a mild giveaway on budget day. It didn’t really feel like it.

Everything they had

Last year, with the economy growing strongly, Fine Gael and Labour threw everything they had at the budget in an attempt to turn around their political fortunes. Although restricted by European fiscal rules in the size of the budget-day package, the coalition got around the rules by announcing an extra €1.5 billion in “supplementary estimates” – extra cash for government departments, which effectively doubled the real size of the budget.

Politically, it was a complete failure. But a lot of budgets are. Governments delude themselves every year that the budget will rescue their fading fortunes; oppositions fret that the government will eclipse them completely by dominating the political discourse for weeks on end.

It almost always fails to materialise. The political equation of any budget is a lot more complicated than simply bestowing giveaways and reaping the political rewards.

Perhaps the giveaways are necessary for political popularity, but they are not enough. Even the torrent of public-spending and tax cuts of the Ahern era did not guarantee popularity; Ahern's 2002-07 government was unpopular for almost all its life; the public returned to Fianna Fáil only at the very end, unconvinced of the alternative.

The blockbuster television show of 2005 – the height of the boom – was Eddie Hobbs's Rip Off Republic, one of whose principal messages was that Irish people were being crucified by high taxes – at a time when taxes were very much lower than in many comparable countries. Double-digit public-spending increases year after year had left the public unmoved.

If we built a bridge to the Aran Islands, one minister in Ahern’s governments once told this writer, they’d want two bridges.

Pyrotechnics

Like everything else, budgets are not what they used to be. European fiscal rules limit what governments can do and have greatly reduced the capacity for the sort of pyrotechnics that McCreevy delighted in. The budget is a more collaborative and technical exercise nowadays.

In his early budgets McCreevy did not even tell Ahern what was in the package until a few days beforehand; nowadays the scale of the budget package, if not its exact composition, becomes evident months in advance, in a series of economic documents – the stability-programme update delivered to Brussels in April, the spring-summer economic statement that follows, the midyear expenditure report in July.

The face-to-face meetings between Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe and his ministerial colleagues began three weeks ago and will continue right up to budget day.

First bids were submitted by the spending departments on September 5th and 6th, but the middle period, before the decisive meetings, is the most entertaining for politics aficionados, as Ministers fly kites and stake out negotiation positions in public before the horse-trading begins behind closed doors.

This year has been quieter than many for prebudget leaking and shape-throwing, partly because Donohoe made it clear to his colleagues that there would be nothing to be gained by it. Winner of the star prize was Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Mary Mitchell O’Connor, whose proposal to extend a special income-tax rate for returned emigrants lasted precisely a morning before being very publicly shot down by Taoiseach Enda Kenny in the Dáil.

Even more unusual ideas, such as one floated by the Independent Alliance to introduce a “granny allowance”, for grandparents who help to mind their grandchildren, remained (largely) unpublicised. To say that politicians and officials alike raised their eyebrows at this proposal doesn’t quite capture the extent of their amusement – or alarm.

Although there is much talk about a different way of doing budgets the pattern has changed little over the years: Ministers go in with requests for huge sums of money, and they are gradually whittled down to a sum that is affordable to the exchequer and acceptable to the department.

One Minister complained that Donohoe was offering 5 per cent of the increase that he was seeking; Donohoe’s refrain has been the same to everyone: I cannot give you money I do not have.

Children’s clothes

This is Donohoe’s first budget; it may be Noonan’s last. (At any rate, it is his sixth.) Noonan sat at the cabinet table 34 years ago when John Bruton’s budget put VAT on children’s clothes, sparking the objections of Independent TDs and spelling the end of Garret FitzGerald’s first government.

Noonan soldiered through the grimmest years of austerity, slashing spending and hiking taxes and telling people that the medicine would work when he didn’t know if it would. He advised Fine Gael to campaign on the economy and watched in horror as the message fell flat in February’s general election. Now he sees the endless pressure for spending increases from every corner of the Government, and he knows that having some leeway is sometimes harder than having none.

To Donohoe falls the task of saying no to most of his colleagues. He is young for such a role, elected for the first time in 2011 and brought into the Cabinet only two years ago. People say he might be Kenny’s favourite for the succession, but then they attribute lots of things to Kenny that might not be true.

Donohoe certainly plays a key role in the Government, however, perhaps the pivotal one. Pressure for additional resources – from departments, public-sector unions, taxpayers – seems likely to be one of the defining themes of this administration. And, no matter how much money he has, Donohoe knows he will never have enough to go around.

He is affable and courteous, telling aides that he is determined to complete the process without any personal rancour with his ministerial colleagues, a goal largely intact at this stage.

He can be tough, too. In a bitter dispute with Aer Lingus pensioners, during his time as minister for transport, demonstrators gathered outside his house, on one occasion shining lights in on his wife and two young children. He was unbending.

In recent months, as the pressure from groups of public servants for pay increases mounted, he stuck rigidly to the position that there would be no deviation from the terms of the Lansdowne Road agreement. “The only game in town” was his favourite phrase.

That position will not alter on Tuesday. That means he is facing industrial action from gardaí, teachers and nurses. The budget may only be the start of it for Donohoe.

Politics meets government

Budget 2017 is probably the single most important political act of the year, the way the Government will most clearly express its political will and demonstrate its capacity.

“Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value,” US vice-president Joe Biden once said.

It’s where politics meets government, where the promises and priorities that politicians outline when campaigning and when in opposition must be reconciled with the limitations and economic realities that constrain the actions of any government.

For the current Government this budget is its first significant task, its first essential test. It must pass the budget, because a government that cannot budget cannot govern. This is a matter of constitutional doctrine as much as it is a political reality: if the Government can’t agree this budget by Tuesday it will fall – and there will be a general election.

It is, of course, the first budget in the era of the so-called new politics. In practical terms this means that Donohoe and Noonan must not only balance the competing interests and desires of their Independent colleagues but also ensure that the budget is acceptable to Fianna Fáil. This is a Government, remember, that does not command a majority in the Dáil. It constantly lives on the edge.

Donohoe keeps a copy of the “confidence and supply” agreement with Fianna Fáil on his desk and maintains regular contact with Dara Calleary, his opposite number.

All budgets are prone to landmines exploding in the hours and days after their announcement. Ministers particularly fear a furious reaction on Liveline, on RTÉ Radio 1. It's not just cuts that can explode: a benefit given to one group and not to another can be just as dangerous. Back in one of McCreevy's budgets the equalisation of tax treatment for working and stay-at-home spouses blew up in his face, almost turning a billion-pound giveaway – at a time when £1 billion was a lot of money – into one of the worst budget disasters.

This time the minefield is inside as much as outside the Government. An adverse reaction from a vocal interest group could send the Independents or Fianna Fáil scuttling back to demand changes.

Donohoe has been telling everyone that a deal will be done, and it almost certainly will be, even if the architecture of agreement has been more complex than before. In a way it’s as important for the Government to demonstrate to itself that it can do this as it is to show it to the outside world.

“Of course we’ll agree it in the end,” said one Minister between complaints about his allocation. “Sure what choice do we have?”