During the late 1990s, Ireland’s economy was booming. This was mostly due to a low corporate tax rate of just 12.5% and an international real estate bubble that boosted global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). For a myriad of reasons Ireland was a magnet for foreign direct investment and the envy of Europe.

Buoyed by cheap money, the Irish government embarked on a debt-fueled property boom from 1997 to 2006, which caused the price of an average house to jump more than four-fold. Flush with tax revenue the government also went on a spending binge: investment in Ireland’s health service soared by five times and pay for government workers doubled.

Unfortunately, the world-wide financial crisis sent Ireland’s boom economy to bust almost overnight; GDP declined more than 14% in the following two years. And, the government’s budget went from surpluses during 2006 thru 2007, to a staggering deficit of 14.3% of its GDP in 2008.

In response to this economic crisis the Irish people and elected officials did something few countries are willing to do: they embraced fiscal austerity. The government slashed spending and raised taxes. Since 2008, seven budgets have taken €28 billion ($38 billion) out of the economy in spending cuts and tax hikes, which amounts to 17% of today’s GDP.

Fiscal austerity runs counter to the popular Keynesian dogma that in times of crisis governments should spend their way out of economic downturns–regardless of the current level of debt. And while I would have preferred Ireland cut additional spending in lieu of raising taxes, I applaud the people’s resolve to embrace smaller government in place of the reckless deficit spending that is in vogue today.

However, Ireland’s belt tightening hasn’t garnered similar favor by all economists. And it has particularly gotten under the skin of the king apologist for Keynesianism….Paul Krugman.

Krugman, who is completely chagrinned by Irish austerity, has devoted an inane amount of time and ink scolding Ireland’s austerity plan and has consistently predicted the country’s imminent economic demise. Even making it personal in a 2010 column where he mocked, “The best thing about the Irish right now is that there are so few of them.”This leaves anyone familiar with the history of Ireland’s sad past with famine that wiped out over one million people, justified to question the true conscious of this particular liberal.