Changing Patterns of International Investment: Implications for Urban Development in Ireland

Ireland is a country which has become extraordinarily dependent on inward investment as the main driver of its economy over the last 50 years. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) "transnationality index" (a composite index based on a number of indicators of the relative intensity of inward investment), Ireland has the second highest level of penetration by foreign direct investment (FDI) in the world (after Hong Kong): its index of 63.2 compares with a weighted average of just over ten for all developed countries (UNCTAD, 2006). This reflects the fact that, unlike countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, which made judicious and selective use of FDI as an aid in the promotion of their indigenous industrial capacity, in Ireland, since the introduction of the inward investment promotion policy in the l~te 1950s, the attraction of inward investment per se has been the main plank of industrial and economic policy

Engineering and Re-engineering Earth: Industrialized Harvesting of Ireland’s Peatlands and its Aftermath

Such has been the transformation of the planet Earth by human activity over the last 200 years thatWood (2009), quoting scientist Paul Crutzen, has suggested that geologists should henceforth refer to these two centuries as the “anthropocene” period. In that time, according to Wood, humans have reshaped about half of the Earth’s surface. While some of this reshaping has been unintended, for the most part it has constituted deliberate engineering, that is, the application of science, technology and know-how to achieve particular ends. The result has been the transformation of the earth, identified by Kates (1987) as one of the key strands of the analysis of human/environment relations, and one of the core concerns of geography as an academic discipline. “Earth” being a concept with many meanings, here we use it to refer to the surface of our planet, which provides the environment for human habitation, and that thin layer of earth’s crust underneath the surface from which humans derive most of the resources which sustain their civilization. The term “earth engineering,” therefore, describes both the restructuring of the earth and the extraction of its resources in order to facilitate human occupation and subsistence. While much of the earth engineering which has occurred to date consists of small and localized incremental alterations, as human technology has advanced so has the scale of earth-engineering interventions, leading to a rising frequency in the incidence of the megaengineering projects which are the focus of the current volume. This chapter focuses on one such project, that is, the large scale mechanized harvesting of peat from Irish bogs, a project which has been ongoing for more than seven decades and is likely to continue for at least two more. In its areal impact, this project represents the most extensive episode of planned earth engineering in Ireland since the transformation of the island’s agricultural landscape associated with the commercialization of farming in the 17th and 18th centuries (Aalen, Whelan, & Stout, 1997). This is a fascinating story in terms of the development and utilization of appropriate technologies, the extent of landscape transformation involved, and the social and economic impacts of this transformation on the areas affected. The remainder of the chapter outlines the physical/environmental and historical background to the launching of the peat harvesting project in the 1930s, provides a descriptive account of the development of mechanized peat harvesting and processing, and analyzes the socioeconomic impact of this development in the areas affected. It concludes with an assessment of the likely uses to which the residual peatlands will be put following the cessation of peat extraction, representing a second exercise in earth engineering which, in terms of the complex issues involved, may prove to be even more challenging than the first

Base metal mining in the Irish Republic

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Casino capitalism and global recession: Historical background and future outlook.

When capitalism first began to emerge as the dominant economic system around the turn of the 19th century in Western Europe and North America, the role of the financial sector in the system was simple and straightforward. When individuals or groups wished to set up a new company, they sold shares in the company to the public in order to raise the initial start-up capital. These shares were generally purchased by people who had accumulated some capital from existing or previous business ventures – industrialists, traders, land owners and wealthy professionals. In general, then, the people who owned these shares were themselves involved in producing and distributing goods and services – what is commonly termed “the real economy” nowadays. They bought shares in the hope that they would generate a better return than the low deposit interest rates available from the banks, and were usually quite happy if the shares gave a return of 5-10%

Agricultural change and the growth of the creamery system in Monaghan 1855-1920

This chapter examines how Monaghan's agricultural economy evolved in the period between the Famine and the partition oflreland in 1921. It begins with an outline of the general features oflrish agriculture in the 19th century which provides a contexr for analysing rrends within county Monaghan itself. A benchmark profile is then presented of the key features of the county's farm economy at the beginning of the review period, against which subsequent change is compared. The process of change is initially analysed for the period 1855- 1880, prior to the introduction to Ireland of the creamery system which was to have a major impact on fuming in Monaghan. The development of this system is then described in some depth, fOllowed by a review of how agriculture in general changed in the county between 1880 and 1920. A concluding section summarises the main findings of the chapter and the subsequent evolution of Monaghan's creamery sector

Japanese manufacturing investment in the Republic of Ireland

The Republic of Ireland has attracted a disproportionate share of Japanese manufacturing investment in Europe. The evolution of this investment is outlined and some characteristics of Japanese plants in Ireland are considered. Finally, some factors likely to hinder the future flow of Japanese investment to Ireland are assessed

Social Polarisation in the Post-Fordist Informational Economy: Ireland in International Context

This paper examines the processes whereby post-Fordist economic restructuring is widely held to have led to growing social polarisation in the advanced capitalist economies. Conceptual fuzziness has clouded the polarisation hypothesis, and a review of international evidence shows no clear trend towards either occupational or earnings inequality. There is stronger evidence of growing household income inequality, due mainly to changes in household composition and national taxation and social welfare policies. In the case of the Republic of Ireland, there has been a more definite tendency towards occupational, earnings and household income polarisation in the 1990s, giving rise to important policy implications at a time of unprecedented national prosperity

Inward Investment in Peripheral Regions: Ireland

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The Structure of Neo-Colonialism: The Case of the Irish Republic

A common characteristic of studies of development emanating from advanced capitalist countries is the use of descriptive rather than structural categorisations. A celebrated example from the discipline of economics is Rostow's schema whereby individual countries are placed in one of five supposedly sequential "stages of economic growth" depending on the presence or absence of certain characteristics. According to this formulation, there is no basic distinction between "developed" and "underdeveloped" countries. Instead, there exists a "continuum" of development ;anging from "least" to "most" developed