ABSTRACT
The economic, social and demographic history of the Republic of Ireland since World War II is distinctive in western European terms. While many of her neighbours experienced strong economic and population growth during the post-war decades, resulting in unprecedented prosperity for the generation born during the post-war baby boom, Ireland experienced economic stagnation and population decline during the 1950s, punctuated by a period of growth in the 1960s and early 1970s, until the traditional pattern of economic stagnation was reinstated in the 1980s (Kennedy et al. 1988). This longstanding pattern of economic underperformance changed in the mid-1990s with the advent of the ‘Celtic tiger’ economic boom. During the decade which followed, Ireland's economic growth caught up with and then surpassed the western European average, employment and household disposable income grew radically and the Irish population expanded by 20 per cent (Clinch et al. 2002). However, this boom came to a shuddering halt in 2007. GNP contracted by 20 per cent during the two years which followed and in November 2010 the Irish government was forced to accept an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the EU, to finance public spending and a bank recapitalization programme (Norris and Coates 2010).
