THE CLUNKY BRIEFCASE is long gone, but Budget day still has its perennial rituals.

On Tuesday, you can expect gasping and groaning from the opposition benches (no matter what’s announced) and bewildered shoppers being asked for their reactions.

But the two old reliables are surely our Finance Minister grimacing for the cameras on The Plinth, and – especially in the last five years – protesters storming the gates of Leinster House.

We start in December 2004, when we were still basking in post-millennial digi-glow, and Budgets were presented on ultra-slick, futuristic “compact discs” (kids, ask your grandparents).

As modelled by the lovely Charlie in 2003:

PA Archive / Press Association Images PA Archive / Press Association Images / Press Association Images

A far cry from just 11 years earlier, when a certain, dashing young Finance Minister held the nation’s economic fate inside what appears, on close inspection, to be a broken briefcase.

PA Archive / Press Association Images PA Archive / Press Association Images / Press Association Images

Here’s a quick trip down memory lane – a flipbook of the last 10 Budgets, and some of the demonstrations that greeted them.

Look out for Brian Cowen drafting in his family for moral support, and a serious intensification of protests as we plunged deeper into the crisis.

If – for some reason – you want to bathe in the memories, here’s a gallery of Budgets Past.