Merchandise trade is accelerating

With a population of just over 4.6 million people and with fewer than two million people in employment, Ireland can only be described as a tiny global economic entity, writes Jim Power.

By any standards, this represents a very limited domestic market. To suggest as some did in the heyday of the construction, banking and consumer boom that Ireland could afford to become more domestically focused due to very favourable demographics, was nonsense then and is nonsense today.

Exports represent the lifeblood of this small open economy and the day we started to believe and act otherwise was a dangerous one.