Not only did Ireland import a huge volume of funds through the banking system, but it also imported a newly relaxed approach to the prudential supervision of mortgage lending. The scale to which the Irish credit bubble eventually grew was also certainly facilitated by the absence of exchange rate risk.
Together with another key element of globalization: the absence of any fear of exchange controls, this ensured the fuel for a turbocharged monocultural expansion of the Irish economy (call it Turbocharger 3.0) at a time when its previous, somewhat more broadly-based and certainly more sustainable, export driven growth was naturally slowing.