Ireland

For generations, the name Ireland has been almost synonymous with emigration, but in recent decades [Page 945]that image has drastically changed. From the 17th century onward, religious intolerance and economic conditions combined to disperse people from Ireland across five of the world's continents. The first major exodus consisted of Northern Irish Protestants seeking opportunities in the new British colonies in North America. The greatest Irish mass emigration occurred toward the middle of the 19th century when successive failures of the potato crop created famine throughout rural Ireland, which was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic in religion. A quarter of the population of eight million was lost either to death by starvation or to emigration. In the United States in 1850, the census estimated that nearly a million of the country's latest immigrants came from Ireland.

During World War II, the Irish Republic maintained a policy of neutrality, which made its integration into the postwar international economy problematic. The Irish government pursued a policy of protectionism that resulted in mass unemployment. Taking advantage of a long-standing policy of free movement of labor between Ireland and Britain, thousands of workers crossed the Irish Sea in response to the demand for cheap labor to help reconstruct the bombed metropolitan areas of England, Wales, and Scotland, and to build the social housing that was promised by the first postwar British governments, both Labor (socialist) and Conservative.

The Celtic Tiger Economy

Right up to the early 1990s, a visitor to the Republic of Ireland observing career guidance being given to a typical group of those leaving school would have noticed that “how to emigrate” was at the top of the agenda, with young Irish people being advised on destinations like London or Boston where they could find low-skilled work in sectors such as the construction industry or the hotel trade. Then, from the mid-1990s, the country went through a rapid transformation, gaining a reputation for itself as the “Celtic Tiger.”

The economic boom of the late 1990s came from two main sources: inward investment and housebuilding, so that by the start of the 21st century, the housing sector was accounting for approximately 15 percent of gross domestic product, approximately twice the average of most other European Union (EU) countries. Some critics of this phenomenon were describing the country as “a building site with a national anthem,” but such comments cut little ice with Irish policy makers and business leaders, who for generations had seen their country regarded as the “joke” economy of western Europe.

Until the Celtic Tiger economy emerged, the Irish Republic was still a net exporter of people, as it had been since the 18th century. The 30 million people worldwide who claimed Irish origin were often called the “Fifth Province” of Ireland. The intelligent use of this diaspora became one of the key elements in the Irish drive to attract inward investment. Irish American business executives were specifically targeted by the Irish government's development agencies and assured that if they were seeking a foothold within the geographical boundaries of the European Union (which Ireland had joined at the same time as the United Kingdom in 1973), they could do no better than to choose a location which was English-speaking, committed to a business-friendly corporate taxation regime, and relatively enthusiastic toward the Single European Market and the euro single currency.

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