Prosperity has brought traffic snarls that fray tempers in this once easygoing society, the cost of housing is as much a topic of dismayed conversation as it is in Manhattan or London, restaurant reservations are hard to come by, and finding a cab is virtually impossible most days. For all the underlying tension, though, few people want to return to the old ways. Yet Ireland's future is not entirely in its own hands. This is particularly true with American technology companies plagued by falling earnings and seesawing stock prices. Many American mainstays in the Irish economy like Dell Computer are watching their stocks plummet back home.
Irish officials seem well aware of the perils.
If we don't offer a competitive environment to produce the goods and services the world needs, we are dead in the water. And there is a keen awareness of the critical nature of American investment. In Europe, language is always an issue, so the trade-off is between wanting to have an efficient operation of a certain size versus doing it in a particular country where the language skills are present. With huge competition luring call- center investment elsewhere like Northern Ireland or depressed parts of mainland Britain Ireland made business sense, he said. They like it here.