Barring a massive culture change, not very. Ireland has no real resources other than gas, and not even a hell of a lot of that. She had (actually still has) a high birth rate, but there was massive emigration throughout the 20th century until the Tiger boom of the 90s, which was largely the result of European structural funding and deregulation of banking. The economy through the 20th century was insular and heavily agricultural, coming too late to industrialisation to have any meaningful manufacturing. She actually went from heavily agricultural to post industrial in about 10 years from the late 80s. When people had money to invest, they tended to invest in land (or pubs) rather than speculative business ventures - Irish people are risk averse in general and begrudging of the success of others, or were until recently. You also have the problem of Church dominance of education, which delivered first class literacy and numeracy but little in the way of vocational education. By the way, I'm nor being nasty about the Irish, being Irish myself