ABSTRACT
Economically, the country was at the back of the European pack, plighted on the one hand by high unemployment and migration and on the other hand by low productivity and anaemic economic growth. The country’s educational elite was considered too wedded to the professions and public service and not enough to management careers in the private sector. Fast forward nearly half a century and the transformation could hardly be more complete. In contrast to the closed, insular economy of the 1960s, Ireland is now one of the most open economies on the planet. Exports of goods and services are 122 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) while imports of goods and services are 89 per cent of GDP. The emergence of a more secular, liberal Ireland cannot be attributed to one factor, but some kind of symbiosis seems to have formed between economic modernization and social liberalization.
