Well, so much has happened since I last blogged. Where to start?The public service have taken a pay cut and there is an embargo on hiring and promotions for the past while.  I do understand how this has come about - we spend something North of 50,000,000,000 Euro per year and we only take in about 30,000,000,000 in revenue.  therefore, the mathematics says that something has to give.The wealthiest in our society still benefit from about 7,000,000,000 in tax breaks and we are going to borrow about 20,000,000,000 this year just to make ends meet.In my department at NUI Maynooth, we have a huge challenge.  We have about 850 students to be taught and we have only 15 permanent academics to do the teaching, with some of them absolved from teaching duties, this means that a LOT of teaching is going to be done by a small number of people.While this brings stresses on the academics themselves, it also means that we have stopped or curtailed a lot of the activities that we would normally provide for students, simply because there is not the staffing to continue.We are almost certainly going to lose more staff over this (we have lost 2 staff members in the past 3 months and they are not to be replaced) - who would want to do this kind of thing?  It’s like trying to hold back the sea.But this is what recession looks like.  There is no money to pay for anything, so we must do more with less.  It’s not fun, it’s not really fair to our students - their education won’t be as good as their predecessors - and it is stressful.One of the hopes for the future is that we would start to produce more of our own innovative technologies - new start-up companies that use Irish people and Irish technologies.  Well, right now we have Irish academics leaving to take up jobs abroad where they have the financial support to work on these technologies.  While we are understaffed and struggling to meet our commitments to teaching undergraduate students, we will never be able to devote the time that is required to spinning out these new technologies.Right now it seems like a downward spiral with little end in sight.