The Irish economy’s golden age: meeting global demand in the 1990s  The near miraculous turnaround of the Irish fiscal and growth environment in the late 1980s has been the subject of a considerable amount of research.3 From the present perspective, what is clear is that it depended heavily on Ireland’s globalized status.
Without the potential and actual surge in exports and export-oriented investment, the turbocharged surge of trendfollowing foreign investment in Irish government paper driving down long-term interest rates and the easy availability of labour not only from the pool of the unemployed but from the pool of returnees and other potential migrants from abroad, the Irish economy could not have moved into the Celtic Tiger phase with barely a hesitation related to the 1992–3 ERM currency crisis.