Working Papers in International Studies Centre for International Studies Dublin City University

Ireland has featured little in development literature, being largely seen as a developed western European state far removed from the challenges facing countries throughout the so-called 'developing world'. Yet for Raymond Crotty, who has been described as 'one of Ireland's most distinguished social science scholars' (Mjøset, quoted in Coughlan, 1998: 140), Ireland was the first country to suffer what he called 'capitalist colonial undevelopment', a fate it now shares with some 140 other post-colonies in the world. While this view was tenable when first advanced by Crotty in the 1980s, the period of high economic growth known as the Celtic Tiger would appear to invalidate his theoretical framework. The purpose of this paper is to place Cotty's work within wider interpretations of Ireland's development, with special attention to the Celtic Tiger period. It interrogates the adequacy of the different approaches identified in the development literature to interpret the ambiguous nature of Ireland's recent development, and highlights the continuing validity of some of Crotty's core insights. Introduction With the publication in 1986 of his study of Irish development entitled Ireland in Crisis: A Study of Capitalist Colonial Undevelopment, Raymond Crotty was recognised as a one of Ireland's leading development thinkers, making a highly original contribution to our understanding of the country's long-term development trajectory. However, his death in 1994 deprived him of the opportunity of responding to a set of circumstances that seemed to call into question many of the central tenets of his theory of Irish 'undevelopment', as he called it. For, over the period 1994-2000 the Republic of Ireland