Morgan Kelly The Irish economy has periodically been held up as an example that other countries can learn from, but the lessons to be learned have varied over time. Depending on the period, it has served as a model to be followed or a sobering lesson in failure. In 1988 The Economist dubbed it “the poorest of the rich”; by 1997 the same magazine was hailing it as “Europe’s shining light”. In the run-up to the Great Recession the country was “a poster-child for what not to do”; by 2013 it was “setting standards” for how to recover ( The Economist 2015, Roche et al. 2016: 1).