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Historians have long debated the relationship between Ireland's long-term economic performance and the distinctive features of its culture and political system. The catastrophic downturn that has taken place since 2008, coming at the end of a period of unprecedented growth, has given these questions a new and pressing relevance. By historicising fluctuations and economic crisis in the more distant past, economic historians can provide important insights for contemporary debates. The four items in this symposium are revised versions of papers delivered to the Annual Conference of the Irish Economic and Social History Society, which was held at University College, Cork, on 17-18 September 2010. Mary Daly's paper covers the belated Irish reaction to the Great Depression in the 1930s, while Brian Girvan argues that the failure of the Irish establishment to engage positively with the new international economic institutions established after the Second World War exacerbated Irish economic difficulties in the 1950s. Frank Barry has focused closely on the Exports Profit Tax Relief Scheme of 1956, as a major turning point which led to greater foreign direct investment thereafter. The final paper by Eoin O'Leary suggests that the small scale of the Irish economy was an important factor in accounting for recent spectacular growth trends, arguing that centralized economic policies are unsuitable for an economy the size of the Republic of Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the methodology and results of an experimental Composite Economic Index developed by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). The aim of the Index is to provide a short term measure of the performance of the NI economy using a mainly output based approach. It combines existing official statistics series from the Index of Services, Index of Production, Index of Construction, Agriculture and public sector employee jobs based on their relative share of annual GVA to provide a chain-linked measure of total quarterly economic activity for NI. The index is not a comprehensive measure of quarterly Gross Domestic Product as there are no income and expenditure components. However the composite methodology has been applied to the equivalent UK series and the results correspond well with the UK GDP series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]