It is hard to imagine – Oscar Wilde telling WB Yeats over Christmas dinner: “We are a nation of brilliant failures.” Today, Dublin is aglow under its Christmas lights, no longer a failure but a success, on a grand scale.

Its Docklands development pulses with energy and enterprise, towering new buildings under construction, more to come and the International Finance Services Centre at its heart – a symbol of Dublin’s fastest-growing sector, a global back office with 250 companies creating thousands of new jobs each year.

Jobs bring money and money breeds wealth. Thus Merrill Lynch has established a wealth management team to look after a new, prosperous Irish generation.

Surveying the glittering statistics that underscore the rise and rise of the Celtic Tiger feels a little like reading a festive fairy tale: output in the decade from 1995 increased by 350 per cent; personal disposable income doubled; exports increasing fivefold; trade surpluses accumulating into billions; booming employment; and the old spectre of migration put to the sword. Ireland and Dublin are “changed, changed utterly” in Yeats’s words. A story to warm an Irishman’s heart, but is it yet complete with a happy ending?

The fashionable salon talk has it that the Celtic Tiger is dead, that the good times have rolled if not to a standstill then at least to something less runaway than before. And, yes, Dublin’s rapid development has brought growing pains. The rush hour, for example, is brutal for commuters, many of whom moved out to the suburbs and beyond when they were priced out of larger homes in the city by the booming property market.

But transportation is not really such an issue for Ireland’s principal industries of financial services, construction, pharmaceuticals and software and, in any case, the country’s expanding economy means that it is looking further afield, beyond its borders. Last week, Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach, opened a much-needed extension to Dublin airport. A new terminal is in the pipeline.

Nor is the Government resting there. Capital expenditure will increase by 12 per cent next year, despite talk of the need for belt-tightening in other areas, such as wage restraint. A €186 million (£134 million) National Development Plan will keep the construction sector moving now that a slowdown is hitting the property market.

The international accent comes with a transatlantic twang. American companies are the biggest players in the Irish economy, with 470 firms employing more than 95,000 people. High-tech multinationals selected Ireland over continental Europe because its 12.5 per cent tax rate on corporate profit is the lowest in Europe.

Google, for instance, has put its European headquarters in Dublin’s rejuvenated Docklands. It employs 800 people, but plans to nearly double that number. Seventy per cent of its workers are foreigners who speak 40 languages between them – an illustration of Ireland’s claim to be the world’s most globalised economy.

All the big names have piled in – Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay – to take advantage of Dublin’s state-of-the-art internet cluster. Microsoft said this month that it would build a $500 million data centre, its first outside the United States, in Dublin.

Peter O’Brien is public policy director of Wyeth, which has just invested €1.8 billion (£1.2 billion) in one of the world’s largest biopharmaceutical plants. He said: “The number one issue for us is education. Sixty-five per cent of our employees have third-level qualifications. Of those, 90 per cent were recruited in Ireland.”

Ireland’s other big attraction is having English as its first language and the euro as its currency, giving it a foot in both camps. When it comes to comparing Dublin with Berlin or Boston, the Irish get to play both sides of the Atlantic.

Ireland’s labour market has grown by 3.2 per cent over the past year to nearly 2.25 million and Eastern European immigrants are filling most of the jobs. For its size, immigration has had the biggest impact on Ireland of the three countries – Britain and Sweden are the others – who in 2004 allowed unrestricted access to ten new European Union members. Do not expect to be served by an Irish person in a bar, hotel or even shop these days.

The country’s most recent labour force report found that the economy gained 67,600 jobs from September 2006 to August this year. Foreigners – 83 per cent of whom came from the new EU states east of the Rhine – filled 48,400 posts, or 71.4 per cent. The jobs market is growing twice as fast as the average across the union, while its available workforce is expanding at more than four times the EU average.

The report said that about 12 per cent of jobholders in Ireland are immigrants, including 30 per cent of workers in hotels and restaurants and about 14 per cent in jobs involving construction or production.

Kevin McCarthy, area director of the Industrial Development Agency, is convinced that there is something in the Irish character that has made all this possible, in the same way that Irish writers have contributed so much to the English-speaking world.

“That has come down into our business culture as well. We are a small, open, global economy – 90 per cent of what we produce we export. We are more into painting pictures than making frames,” he said.

For most of the 20th century, Dublin’s Docklands formed the last sight of their homeland for thousands of Irish emigrants. But the tide has turned decisively and the view of the docks would now be unrecognisable to those who once had no choice but to depart Erin’s shore.

Vital statistics

Name A corruption of the Irish Dubh Linn, which means “black pool”, although the modern Irish is Baile Atha Cliath, which translates as “settlement of the ford of the reed hurdles”

Area 11,496 hectares (115 sq km)

Population 1.1 million in Greater Dublin, 496,000 in City of Dublin

Density 4313 people/sq km

GDP €69.9 billion

Cost of living loaf of bread: €1

Timezone GMT

Currency Euro

Visa regulations none for European Union citizens

Website dublin.ie

Direct flights available from British Airways, Ryanair, Aer Lingus, Air France, BMI and others

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