Apart from the measures to be taken in next week's budget, the government's four-year 'National Recovery Plan' was redundant even before the ink on its 140 pages was dry.

Interminable analysis of what's in this deeply disappointing election manifesto dressed up as a medium-term economic plan is totally irrelevant. The 'markets' know that. So do the tens of thousands of worried people who marched yesterday. So do the politicians.

The document is a set of impoverished aspirations which totally ignore the multi-billion euro cost of the latest banking resolution being finalised with the EU and IMF and relies on growth figures in 2013 and 2014 which are probably unattainable.

When Fine Gael and Labour get into power, there will be no question of asking the EU?or IMF if they can recalibrate it or fine tune some of the targets.

It will have to be totally rewritten and, unfortunately, given the extra billions we are going to have to pay back in interest to the same EU and IMF, not to anyone's advantage.

The only real positive is that the European Commission's insistence that a medium-term, sector-by-sector plan be drawn up and reviewed annually to ensure that targets are met now sets a precedent for future economic mapping.

The measures for next year have also given us limited certainty. We know broadly what sort of tax hikes and welfare cuts we can expect in the budget.

This is the only part of the plan that can be taken with any seriousness. And given the heavy emphasis on cutting welfare and taxing the less well-off, it is very unfair.

The rest is all politics, an exercise in damage limitation which long-fingers difficult decisions such as the introduction of a property tax and water charges and prolongs the unseemly Green alchemy of turning university fees into registration charges, so that the dirt of doing the deed will stick on the hands of a government of another hue. There is a clear agenda of treading as carefully as possible around Fianna Fáil's traditional homeowning middle-class, older support base in the hope that, when the anger dies down, they will return to the fold over time.

Brian Lenihan, in a tetchy parting shot at the press conference to launch the plan, effectively fired the first shots of Fianna Fáil's election campaign. The plan, he said, "has to be the basis for any sensible proposals for the next general election. Anything else that's put forward is nonsense."

What's really nonsense is the delusion that the longer-term figures in this plan hold any water at all. Last week, Eurozone GDP growth figures were forecast by Euroframe, the network of 10 think tanks including the ESRI, to be about 1.6% in 2011 and 1.7% in 2012. Lenihan says the National Recovery Plan is "all the government's own work". It forecasts domestic growth exclusive of multinationals of 1% in 2011 and 2.5% in 2012, figures which seem extraordinarily optimistic given the appalling state we are in now and the fact that we are squeezing the economy to the pips in next year's budget. Interest payments on the EU/IMF deal to be concluded today, however much of the burden the bondholders are asked to share, will be a further major drag on growth.

Credibility has always been a problem with this government but these forecasts border on the sort of delusional claims usually reserved for election manifestos.

But what's really worrying is that the cynical politicisation of the four-year plan could actually derail the budget itself. This level of political self-interest in a document purporting to be in the national interest can only encourage other politicians and groups to be similarly parochial.

Despite what most commentators are saying, the budget vote remains on a knife-edge.

Michael Lowry has not given a categorical assurance that he will support it. If anything, it appears both he and Jackie Healy-Rae are adamant they don't want to be cast as the scapegoats in the eyes of the public, by voting for such a bleak budget, leaving Fine Gael and Labour to walk away scot-free.

Nobody wants these harsh measures and there may well be other ways out of the mire we are in, though all will be extremely painful. But on purely practical grounds, the budget has to be passed next week, however harsh and unfair it is.

Over time, a new government may find ways to unpick the worst of it. It is hoped they will also introduce the dramatic reforms that politics, governance, business and public life need.

But if the budget fails and the government falls just as a rescue package is agreed, it will cause untold international chaos and hostility which could be disastrous – not just for us, but all of Europe.

All that is happening to us now is unprecedented, but the turbulence of those sort of waters is not something either Fine Gael or Labour, as our likely next government, should test on our behalf.