In a radio broadcast on Easter day 1943, Eamon DeValera, patriarchal Prime Minister of the Irish Free State, described his vision of a self-sufficient Gaelic nation replete with comely maidens, cosy homesteads and, presumably, a reunited Ulster. “The Ireland we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis of a right living,” the Fianna Fail party leader intoned, “of a people who were satisfied with a frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to things of the spirit. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desired men to live.” In 1958 the autarkic policies Fianna Fail had promoted since it first assumed political power a quarter century earlier were abandoned without fanfare or remorse. A “post-revolutionary” generation of self-proclaimed pragmatists steered their fraction of the island into Europe – by which they meant the common market – and the era of push button technology. God evidently desired that the Irish enjoy more prosperity.

Banishing the donkey-and-cart age to Tourist Board posters the Irish Republic industrialized by introducing economic planning – cuphemized in the accurately timid term “programming” – and, more importantly, by converting itself into a haven for footloose capital. These two tactical strands interwove in a frayed way in the export-led development strategy by which policy-makers commenced “chasing progress.”