IT WAS only the one o'clock news, and RTE's coverage of the 'bad news budget' hadn't even begun in earnest, yet Economics Editor George Lee was already striking the tone for the day.

"People," said George, "aren't going to come out of this Budget feeling anything other than that they've been run over by a steamroller." Come on, George, don't hold back -- give it to us straight. We can take it.

STORM

On mature recollection, as the Finance Minister's father once said a long time ago and in a different context, George was probably being uncommonly restrained in his assessment of what was in store for us.

Forget being flattened by a steamroller; this was more like being bundled into a cement mixer and spun round and round until you threw up -- or at least it would have if the country's cement mixers hadn't ground to a halt along with the building industry.

On the Budget special proper, Bryan Dobson was contemplating the weather. Talking to Katie Hannon, who was parked outside Dail Eireann, Bryan asked: "Does it feel like you're at the eye of the storm?"

"Well, the eye of the storm is often a very quiet place," Katie said, inscrutably, as the cars roared loudly along Kildare Street and the wind played havoc with her hair. It was a little touch of pathetic fallacy.

If you studied Shakespeare at school, you might recall pathetic fallacy. See that scene where King Lear is going mad on the heath and the storm seems to be reflecting the turmoil inside his head? That's pathetic fallacy.

ammunition

But what about the Taoiseach and his silver bullet. Brian Cowen warned last week that the emergency Budget would be no silver bullet to cure all our ills. It occurred to me then he might be getting his ammunition confused.

You use silver bullets to kill werewolves. I think what Cowen meant to say was a magic bullet, like the one German doctor Paul Ehrlich developed to cure syphilis in the 19th century. On second thoughts, given that we all feel mortally wounded today, maybe it was a silver bullet he had in mind all along.

On the stroke of 3.45pm, Brian Lenihan arrived in the chamber to unburden his burdens on to the bruised and creaking shoulders of the populace. Opposition party TDs delayed the inevitable by rowdily complaining that the press had been given a copy of the Budget speech before they had.

But when they eventually got to read it, they probably wished they hadn't. As Lenihan demonstrated his collection of shiny butcher's knives, the camera panned to Bertie Ahern.

He looked miles away and was probably happy to be so. After the fallout from yesterday, though, Bertie might find himself even more miles away from that fat job in the Aras he so clearly craves.

After the speech, Bryan confessed to being "stunned".

"It's quite a savage budget," said finance journalist Richard Curran. "Savage" would turn out to be one of the day's buzzwords, as would "disgrace".

cancelled

Sinn Fein's Caoimhin O Caolain also identified a cutback that even the sharpest-eyed economists had overlooked. "Brian Lenihan," he said, "has cancelled Santa Claus."

No Budget would be complete, of course, without Eddie Hobbs, who said: "It's not a Budget, really, it's the start of a five-year austerity plan -- but at least we have a proxy plan."

Forget the proxy plan. Can I have one of those RTE umbrellas? One big enough to cover, say, the whole of my house?