2. Tracing Ireland’s ‘Liberal’ Crisis and Recovery

Ireland’s deep crisis after 2008 was most immediately produced by the bursting of a real estate and banking bubble combined with collapsing tax revenues. This was made possible by Ireland’s continuing weakness in developing indigenous enterprise and investment, its limited social contract and emergent tensions in its historical external ties with the UK, the USA and Europe. More generally, the character of Ireland’s crisis was rooted in its varied history of economic liberalism, and particularly in an aggressive liberalism of the 2000s that succeeded earlier periods of passive and activist liberalism. Finally, despite recent economic and employment growth, Ireland’s recovery remains tenuous, given the re-emergence of historical patterns and the failure to address some key dilemmas in the ‘Irish model’.