Anon 2006

Archiseek 2007

Archiseek: Bank of Ireland HQ, Baggot Street, Dublin URL

Archiseek: Carroll's Factory URL

Art at Park West 2007

Bank of Ireland HQ 2007

Barrow St, Dublin

Author's photograph

Blanchardstown Corporate Park

Brady Shipman Martin 1994

Callanan 2006

Carr 2007

Carrolls Factory 2007

Castells 1996

Chang 2006

Chung et al. 2001

City West 2007

Dalkey, Skerries and Dun Laoghaire in context of Dublin

Google Earth screen shot

Delaney and Delaney 1966

Dublin Corporation Planning Department 1990

E-Bay

E-Bay Terms and Conditions

eBay: Global reach

eBay has rapidly become so ubiquitous that it is now difficult to appreciate how unlikely a premise it seemed when it first appeared. At a time when people were still suspicious of buying goods online, even from prominent sites like Amazon, a site which operated on the basis of trust must have appeared doomed to failure. However, eBay brilliantly understood the internet's capacity to create vast networks in which individuals nonetheless felt empowered. Rather than feeling like an anonymous global entity, the site came across as a vast compendium of specific individuals with specific offerings. Every transaction was both global and local—local in the sense that it involved private individuals in dealings with each other, global in the sense that those individuals might live half-way round the world from each other, but could be directly linked through the site.

eBay's promise was to connect those with something to sell to those who, however unlikely the product, would be interested in buying it. In its initial incarnation as AuctionWeb, the first item sold on the site was the founder Pierre Omidyar's broken laser pointer. On enquiring why the buyer had paid $14.83 for it, he was told that they collected broken laser pointers.

In its initial stages, the site celebrated its ability to create a marketplace for the kind of rare and unusual goods that would otherwise be hard to find. Its feedback system proved effective in guaranteeing very low levels of fraudulent trading. As it has grown there has been a change in the character of the site's transactions, with many users now creating shops to sell items at fixed prices, and an increasing number of retailers and companies using eBay to get rid of everything from remaindered stock to excess inventory worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where once a single copy of an out-of-print book might have been up for auction, now there are many available, all at the same standard price. (Thirty-four per cent of last year's transactions used the 'Buy it Now' fixed-price option.)

Very rapidly, the site has come to be structured according to the norms of the market economy—its network of private individuals transformed into a complex infrastructure of traders. The layer of middlemen with which it originally dispensed has reassembled in force. eBay has spawned a large number of secondary industries, including chains of drop-off stores such as isoldit.com, as well as contributing to a huge upturn in business for delivery services such as FedEx and UPS. eBay now has a huge global reach and a global impact.

Economic Development and Foreign Investment

It was during the leadership of Sean Lemass in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that Ireland first began to move away from an economic policy of self-sufficiency towards an embrace of the global marketplace. The so-called Whitaker Report, a white paper on Economic Development published in 1957, did much to spur economic reform, by recommending the pursuit of foreign direct investment (known as FDI) in Ireland, both as a direct boost to the economy and as a means of fostering native industry. The Industrial Development Authority (IDA), initially established in 1949, and incorporated as an autonomous state-sponsored body in 1969, led Ireland's efforts to attract large companies to Ireland (Lee 1989: 341–59;O'Riain 2004).

With the state offering low rates of corporation tax, and innovations such as the world's first export zone in Shannon (established under the first program for economic expansion in 1958), the role of the IDA was to stress these and other advantages—such as its geographical position and its young, educated workforce—in presenting Ireland as the ideal environment for major US corporations and industries seeking to expand into Europe. Initially focused on pharmaceuticals companies, in subsequent decades the emphasis shifted towards computer-related industries.

Concomitant with this was a move away from presenting Ireland as a glorified entrepôt—a staging post between markets—and instead selling it as a potential base for manufacturing and research and development. In turn, this strategy sought to switch Ireland's economy from one based primarily on low-skilled jobs to one offering more specialised, high-skilled operations.

From the outset, the focus on foreign investment produced tensions and imbalances. The theory that global enterprises, while benefiting from local conditions in Ireland, would also facilitate local enterprise in harnessing the momentum of the global economy, was only fitfully successful. Instead, what emerged was an almost two-tier system in which IDA-sponsored companies seemed to enjoy special status, while Irish industry remained relatively unsupported and largely moribund.

Infrastructure also seemed to be geared towards the global rather than the local scale. A state-of-the-art telecommunications network installed in the early 1980s facilitated the needs of international business while having relatively little impact on local communications. Achieving ease of movement in and out of the country seemed more important than investing in the development of towns and cities.