Ireland took over the rotating presidency of the European Union on 1 January as a wounded country.

When Dublin last took the EU’s helm in 2004, the Irish economy was on the crest of an economic boom that was the envy of Europe. Then the bubble burst, plunging Ireland into one of the eurozone’s most precipitous declines.

Between 2008 and 2010, the Irish economy contracted by over 10 per cent.

Unemployment has more than tripled since 2007 to more than 14 per cent. There is no sign of any significant decline in the coming years - despite the return of mass emigration.

In the year up to April, 46,500 Irish people left the country, almost four times more departures than in 2007 before the eurocrisis engulfed the economy. On average, 3,000 more emigrate every month.

Despite the grim data, Ireland has won praise from some in Europe for rigorously applying austerity programmes aimed to controlling government debt which has more than quadrupled since 2007.

“I have every confidence that Ireland is on track,” Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said on a visit to Dublin in October, adding that the country’s austerity programme is "working well."

Many in Ireland see things differently.

"There is no recovery here," says Macdara Doyle, communications officer at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU).

"The idea that we are some sort of poster boy for a failed European strategy is nonsense," he told Equal Times. "This is more out of desperation than anything else, because the authorities that are imposing this austerity across Europe need a success story."

To coincide with the EU presidency, the ICTU is organising demonstrations across the country on 9 February. The message to the Irish government and European authorities is that austerity isn’t working.

"We have taken over €28 billion out of the economy and all we have is record unemployment and massive emigration," Doyle said in a telephone interview from Dublin.

"There no sense of hope, there is no sense of growth and there’s no sense of any plan or strategy for growth."

The unions are hoping the Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny will use the country’s six-month EU stint to push for an agreement within Europe that eases Ireland’s crippling €64 billion banking debt.

The state pumped that money into its banks to stop them going under when Ireland’s property bubble burst in 2009.

That has pushed up the national debt which is expected to peak at 122 per cent of gross domestic product next year, the third highest rate in the EU behind Greece and Italy.

"Unless Ireland gets a very significant deal on its banking debt, we are doomed to, at best, bump along the bottom for the next decade," Doyle warns.

"It is acting as a millstone. it keeps effectively on an austerity treadmill. No matter how much we cut, we have to cut more. It’s a self-defeating process, a downward spiral."

Kenny has said he’s hoping for a deal with his EU partners to ease repayment terms on the bank debt during Ireland’s presidency.

That would help Ireland return to the bond markets before the end of the year, he told Reuters in a 19 December interview. That would end Ireland’s dependence on the €67.5 billion bailout deal struck with the European Union and International Monetary Fund in 2010.

The Irish government likes to point out that unlike Greece and Portugal – the other euro-zone nations forced into EU-IMF bailouts – Ireland has returned to growth, albeit at an anaemic 0.4 per cent in 2012.

To secure real recovery, Irish and other European unions are hoping the presidency will also push for a new pro-growth agenda to end the eurozone crisis.

"The unions themselves, a bit like the ETUC (European Trade Union Confederation) at a European level, have called for jobs and growth strategy, a stimulus to reinvigorate and re-stoke domestic demand," Doyle explains.

"Most of the Irish economy is based around domestic consumption and domestic demand and that has fallen by over 25 per cent over the last couple of years. We’ve lost 380,000 jobs in about three years – that is absolutely calamitous. No economy can sustain that sort of heavy damage and expect to recover."