The Irish Republic - A 'Showpiece of Globalisation'?

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

The paper gives a comprehensive picture of fundamental issues connected with the Irish "economic miracle", with especial regard to the globalisation effect. The analysis of Ireland's economic development in the period from 1960 to 2003 answers the question why it decelerated, instead of accelerating, for a long time: two decades after the accession to the European Community in 1973 and mainly the enigma, the "economic miracle" why the rate of growth accelerated in the decade after 1993 to an extent (on annual average to almost 8 percent) similar to that previously observed only in East Asia. The country has not only caught up economically with the European Union, but has approximated the level of development of the United States. The analysis shows that all this can be attributed not only to Ireland's favourable conditions, but also to an adequate economic policy and foreign direct investment. The author reveals the so-called globalisation effect that in Ireland after 1993 had a decisive role in the extraordinary acceleration of economic growth.

Policy & Politics, 2004

The Irish Republic has been widely hailed as a 'showpiece of globalisation'. This article argues that although Ireland has experienced considerable change in recent years, there is little evidence to suggest that it has indeed been 'globalised'. Yet the discursive construction of globalisation may in itself play an independent causal role in shaping political outcomes. The article thus also explores the role of ideas about globalisation in shaping Irish policy change.

Journal of World-Systems Research

From famine to financialization: O'Riain's Celtic Tiger is an important stepping stone on the way to a theoretical revitalization of the semiperiphery. This book and the recent collection of excellent articles in JWSR (Vol 22, No 1, 2016) provide a strong case for updating-not ignoring or obliterating-the concept of the semiperiphery. Reflecting on O'Riain's book from a world-system perspective, I was struck by similarities with other semiperipheries. Ireland is a small open economy with significant legacies of postcolonialism and underdevelopment. O'Riain's main goal is to trace the road by which Ireland evolved from massive government debt, high levels of inequality, unemployment, and emigration in the 1980s, to the Celtic Tiger, an economic miracle with indigenous and foreign investment, rising employment, and market-led globalization with high-tech exports in the 1990s, and then to the vertiginous collapse followed by aggressive austerity policies. O'Riain provides an extensively researched and detailed analysis of the social, economic, and political conditions which came together to produce the disastrous 2008 crash. He describes the process by which the earlier Irish development project was undermined. He considers the interaction among FDI, international factors, and domestic politics in building up a precarious economic base and their contribution to the devastating financialization.

2002

Journal of World-Systems Research, 2016

In 2008 Ireland entered an economic free-fall. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger challenged some of the central tenets of mainstream political thought in Ireland, as the country was revealed to be less a deregulated mouse that roared, and more of a politically weak and underdeveloped semiperiphery whose elite had little real control over the country's economy. Since then, the Irish political elite, as well as the ECB-IMF-European Commission Troika, have shown themselves to be strong supporters of socially destructive austerity policies. This has prompted a slowly emerging backlash, most notably protests against government plans to privatize the water supply. And in the recent February 2016 elections, a process of serious electoral realignment along Left-Right lines has been clearly evident. New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.

In 2008 Ireland entered an economic free-fall. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger challenged some of the central tenets of mainstream political thought in Ireland, as the country was revealed to be less a deregulated mouse that roared, and more of a politically weak and underdeveloped semiperiphery whose elite had little real control over the country's economy. Since then, the Irish political elite, as well as the ECB-IMF-European Commission Troika, have shown themselves to be strong supporters of socially destructive austerity policies. This has prompted a slowly emerging backlash, most notably protests against government plans to privatize the water supply.

Irish Studies Review, 2010

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, far away, the Communist Party in each part of the Soviet empire was given a 'brotherly working-class party' from a benighted capitalist country to look after. The special protégé of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania's Communist Party was Ireland, so the general secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland, Michael O'Riordan, was a regular guest at the official seaside town of Palanga. On almost every visit, he gave an interview to the state newspaper. He would stress the similarities of Lithuania and Ireland, with their comparable area and population size. But, recalled the Lithuanian writer Simonas Daukantas, his recurring theme was, 'How much Ireland could learn from Lithuania's non-capitalist way of development' and that 'Lithuania shows what would be Ireland's achievements if the country went socialist' .1 By 2005, there were 70,000 Lithuanian immigrants working in Ireland. Lithuanian students were being told 'How much Lithuania could learn from Ireland's free market way of development' and that 'Ireland shows what would be Lithuania's achievements if the country went capitalist' . The Lithuanians were urged to create a Baltic Tiger in conscious emulation of the Celtic Tiger. And by the end of 2008, the Lithuanian government was running job fairs in Dublin, offering the migrants a way out of the imploded Irish dream.2 1 S.

2007

In this interview, Denis O'Hearn presents his views of Ireland's historical and contemporary status in the capitalist world-system and which countries Ireland could be profitably compared with. He discusses how Ireland has changed since the publication of his well-known work on The Atlantic Economy (2001) and addresses questions related to the European Union and the looming break-up of Britain as well as contemporary Irish politics on both sides of the border. O'Hearn also touches on the current state of Irish academia.

The World Economy, 2012

T HE Irish economy has featured strongly in world economic commentary in recent years, and it is fitting that a special issue of The World Economy be devoted to it. The reasons for this attention are not hard to find. For most of the 1990s, Ireland was regarded as a shining example of what could happen to an economy if the right combination of economic policies were followed (although the relative contribution of different contributing factors was widely debated). Of course it had taken a very long time for this combination to be found. As recently as the mid-1980s, Ireland was regarded as the 'poorest of the rich' (to use the Economist's phrase), and it seemed that it was destined to ever be so. That all changed dramatically in the 1990s when the Irish economy grew at an unprecedented rate. For many years, it seemed that both internal and external factors were working together to deliver sustainable economic growth, and Ireland quickly received attention around the world as a posterchild example of a successful economic transformation. The first half of the 2000-09 decade was a little harder to assess. After what seemed to be a temporary slowdown in 2001 and 2002, economic growth resumed again for several years at very high rates. But while the earlier boom had been based on a classic virtuous cycle of export-led growth, the surge in economic growth from 2002 to 2007 was based on domestic consumption and production and was characterised by a housing sector that exhibited many signs of a bubble. When the world economy slowed down in 2007 and went into a full-scale economic and financial crisis in 2008, the Irish economy was more vulnerable than most. The collapse in the Irish economy has been spectacular, and there is a great deal of interest in how, and indeed whether, it can recover from this collapse. The papers in this symposium were presented at a special conference on the Irish economy organised and sponsored by Lehigh University's Martindale Center for the Study of Private Enterprise and held at Lehigh University in