Ireland turns corner from crisis to recovery

"Investors, for various reasons, believe that Ireland will grow; that Ireland is going to be able to service its debts. They don't believe that that's the case with Portugal or Greece and they have doubts with one or two other countries," Simon Tilford of the CER, told DW.

"Ireland is a very small and very open economy, with very high levels of social cohesion a very big safety valve in terms of emigration," Tilford added. "Unemployment is high, but it would be much higher without it. They think that it's an economy that can and will be able to boost exports sufficiently to offset the weakness of domestic demand." ..."The EU will certainly try to sell it as a success story because they need one," explained Tilford. "I don't think it's particularly credible. I don't think it makes sense to talk of a success story when an economy is 10 percent smaller than it was and has seen its debt stock relative to GDP rise by 100 percentage points of GDP, which is experiencing mass emigration and mass unemployment at the same time. If you think that's a success it begs the question what failure would have looked like."