The Celtic Tiger: A Cautionary Tale of Economic Success and Social Failure in a Globalised World

2Ireland’s economic success since the mid 1990s has earned it the title, the Celtic Tiger. Taking the East Asian analogy further, one analyst has described the Irish state’s role in this success as that of a flexible development state, while some scholars see in the Irish case a model of developmental success for small, peripheral states in a globalising world. This paper takes issue with such interpretations, arguing that the Irish state’s role has not been developmental and that, far from being a model to follow, the Irish case is a cautionary tale of the social costs of economic success and of the resituating of the state so that it prioritises the demands of multinational capital accumulation over the welfare of society. The paper begins by examining the nature of the Celtic Tiger. The second section outlines the case being made that the Irish state is a developmental state. The third section challenges this interpretation and uses a theoretical approach drawn from the new IPE to offer an interpretation which, it is argued, more fully and adequately explains the correlation of economic success with social failure in the Irish case. The final section draws lessons about the limits for manoeuvre open to small relatively underdevelope