Dublin - In the first budget since Ireland's economic crash, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan is set to announce Tuesday 2 billion euros (2.7 billion dollars) in cuts aimed at tackling the "most difficult conditions in living memory."

Disappearance of state agencies, tax increases, child benefit cuts and increases in hospital charges are just some of the scares in store in a budget being compared to early Halloween in Ireland.

Dublin - Ireland's Financial Regulator has fined the Irish Nationwide building society 50,000 euros (67,950 dollars) following the circulation of an e-mail soliciting new deposits based on Ireland's bank guarantee, a statement said Tuesday.

The Financial Regulator said it had "reasonable cause to suspect that Irish Nationwide breached a regulatory requirement in relation to General Principle 1, Chapter 1 of the Financial Regulator's Consumer Protection Code," the statement added.

Dublin - The Irish economy is to contract more than previously thought in 2008, according to the latest quarterly report released on Tuesday by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), a Dublin-based think tank.

The ESRI revised downward its estimate that Ireland's gross national product (GNP) would contract by 0.4 per cent in 2008, saying that it now predicted a 1.3-per-cent fall.

A country's GNP is its economic output without the contribution made by multinational companies.

Ireland's GNP would fall by 0.7 per cent in 2009, the ESRI said.

Dublin - The Central Bank in Dublin forecast Friday that Ireland's economy would contract by 0.8 per cent this year and that the recession would "persist" in 2009.

"After more than a decade of very strong growth, the Irish economy has entered a difficult period of slowdown and adjustment," the bank said in a statement.

Ireland's gross domestic product grew by 6 per cent in 2007.

Dublin - Ireland has seen 1,500 pubs close since 2001, two groups representing pub owners told national broadcaster RTE Thursday.

Dublin - The Irish Association of Pension Funds has warned that some private pension funds would collapse during the current financial crisis unless action was taken to shore them up, national broadcaster RTE reported Thursday.

The association had sent proposals to the government on how to deal with the problem, association chairman Patrick Burke said at the start of its annual conference in Dublin.

One proposal was to allow people about to retire to put off buying annuities as costs had increased owing to the credit crisis. You purchase an annuity when you hand over a lump sum in return for a stream of income over a defined period until your death.