Ireland: the comeback kid does it again

Ireland has made a roaring comeback since it almost went bankrupt in 2008/09.

Andrew Van Sickle
By
published
in Features

"There is economic life after death," says The Economist. Ireland has made a roaring comeback since it almost went bankrupt in 2008/2009, when its burst housing bubble floored the banking sector. In those two years, GDP shrank by 11%. In the third quarter alone, it grew by 1.4%, pushing the annual pace up to 7%. In 2014, it managed to expand by 5%.

What went right? Ireland's GDP is very dependent on exports, so the weak euro, a result of the European Central Bank's money printing, has helped. Ireland also kept its 12.5% corporation tax rate, a low figure that's encouraged multinationals to secure a presence there. America and Britain are two of Ireland's biggest trading partners, both of which been outperforming the rest of the developed world in recent years. And it's relatively insulated from the emerging-market slowdown, saysThe Economist.

The domestic economy has slowly revived too, with lower energy prices boosting consumer spending. Rapid growth is shrinking the public debt pile, which peaked at 120% in 2013 (almost five times its 2007 level). More than a fifth of it will have vanished by the end of this year. Growth may cool from today's "blistering pace", says Richard Barley in The Wall Street Journal, but Ireland will remain the "eurozone's comeback kid".

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Andrew Van Sickle
Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.

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