Generations of people have learned to live with boom and bust economic cycles.
Years of relative plenty were followed, as night follows day, by grief including high unemployment and forced emigration on a large scale.
In fact, if you go back much beyond the late 1960s, it would not be too cynical to say the cycles were often more about going from bust to really busted, as for decades the country was hit by crippling rates of largely enforced emigration.
The 1980s into the 1990s saw politicians across the western world, including Ireland, adopt the mantra: “We need to end that cycle of boom and bust.”
Ireland’s inexorable moves to joining the EU single currency began with voters endorsing the 1992 Maastricht