Here's an infographic created by my good friend Oliver, trying to put some context on the cost of the bailout for Ireland - €45 billion.

Numbers like this make little sense without context, so this tries to make some sense of the comparative scale.

As usual Wikipedia has an excellent summary of the Irish financial crisis and bailout.

I'm not sure the above gives the best possible context though. If you've got better comparison figures, drop them in the comments below?

The 2009 Budget was presented yesterday. Full coverage in the Irish Times, on RTE, in the Independent, etc. There is detail and analysis everywhere. But it's interesting to look at Brian Lenihan's budget presentation, in the form of his speech - and comparing it to Brian Cowen's budget statement from December 2007, using some simple visualizations.

Below are some interactive visualizations I built quickly using IBM's Many Eyes project, as presented at the Web 2.0 Expo last month in New York. Click on each image to use an interactive version of the visualization. You can customise word limits, make comparisons and search for keywords used in each speech (note: if you're viewing this within Facebook, these may not show for you, see my original post here).

Budget 2009: Brian Lenihan's Speech: Word Tree visualization (shows phrase branches - enter a phrase to see branching)

Budget 2009 Speech: Wordle representation (more instances = larger words; you can interact & select word limits)

Budget 2008 & 2009: Phrase comparison between the two speeches (more instances = larger words, again click to interact and compare single words, phrases, etc.)

Budget 2008: Brian Cowen's speech from December 2007: Wordle representation (to compare with the above)

Feel free to create your own better and more in-depth visualizations based on the budget - the data sets I used are already loaded to Many Eyes and freely available for you to manipulate.