One day in 1956, the Irish civil servant TK Whitaker had a jolt when he saw the cover of Dublin Opinion magazine. An illustration showed an empty Ireland, beside the text “Shortly Available: Undeveloped Country, Unrivalled Opportunities, Magnificent Views, Political and Otherwise, Owners Going Abroad”. Ireland’s model of economic and emotional autarky had failed. Nearly half a million Irish people emigrated in the 1950s. By 1960, fewer than 3mn were left in the republic.
Besides people, Ireland mostly exported cattle, often on the same boats. So thin were trade flows that individual racehorses, travelling back and forth to Britain for races, could move the numbers. Whitaker, in his spare time, began writing a pamphlet that outlined a new Irish model. He advocated “production for export markets” and said “freer trade in Europe must be faced”. In 1958, his so-called Grey Book became government policy.
Ireland had decided to globalise, even if nobody at the time used that word. The plan worked. Today’s rich, open country originated with Whitaker (who died aged 100 in 2017), as Fintan O’Toole explains in We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958.