Reflections on the Process of Irish Economic Growth

Table 1 shows the growth rates of output volume, population and employment in Ireland over various periods since 1926. I take the last period, 1993-2000, as the Celtic Tiger phase. In 1993, total employment was just back to the 1980 level after the large fall in the first half of the 1980s during the worldwide recession following the second oil crisis, and the 1993 level was still 7 percent below that of 1926. It is essentially since 1993 that Ireland has experienced the wholly novel phenomenon of rapid and sustained growth in employment.