Faiza Filali graduated from the University of Notre Dame in May with a bachelor’s degree in political science and government. This summer, through Notre Dame Dublin’s Irish Internship Program, she is working with ARINS (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South), a joint project of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and the Royal Irish Academy.
She wrote this opinion piece for an Irish audience with the observation, “Korea and Ireland set out from almost the same place: colonised, partitioned, poor, emptied by emigration. On Korean Constitution Day, it’s worth asking why one country owns its prosperity and the other mostly rents it.”
Every 17 July, Korea celebrates a holiday that most Koreans now spend at work. Jeheonjeol, Constitution Day, marks the morning in 1948 when a country that had spent 35 years as a Japanese colony and was weeks away from being cut in half sat down and wrote itself a constitution. It was a national holiday for 60 years. Then, in 2008, when the five-day week came in, the government quietly removed the day from the calendar of paid holidays. Though it has recently returned, some Koreans still clock in to the office regardless. There is something distinctly Korean about a country so busy building itself that it stopped taking the day off it had set aside to celebrate its own founding.
I lived in Seoul for a year, and what stayed with me wasn’t the place’s speed, though that can’t be denied. The Han River cuts through Seoul much as the Liffey runs through Dublin, although on a vastly different scale. Walk along the Han on a summer evening, past the cyclists and the convenience-store soju and the apartment towers stacked up the far bank, and you’re looking at a river that lent its name to the most dramatic economic story of the last century. In 1960, income per head in Korea was less than 100 euros a year, lower than that of most of sub-Saharan Africa. Today it’s north of 30,000.
You feel that memory in the people, not just in the figures. The grandmothers selling vegetables near Gyeongbokgung were children during the Korean War, when Seoul changed hands four times, and much of it was reduced to rubble. Their grandchildren now queue for flat whites in Seongsu, a district of old shoe factories now turned into cafés and flagship stores, similar to the transformation of Dublin’s Dockyards. Two generations, from real hunger to one of the richest cities on earth. Koreans carry that arc consciously, and it shows up in the films, the politics, the pride, and the anxiety alike. A society that remembers being poor behaves differently from one that has only ever known comfort, and a good deal of what reads as relentlessness from the outside is really that memory still doing its work.
Why bring this to an Irish reader? Because Korea’s starting line looked very much like Ireland’s. Both countries were colonised by a powerful neighbor next door and spent a long time being told they were too backward to run their own affairs. Both were partitioned within a few years of independence, and both still live with the border that resulted from it. Both were agricultural, both were poor, and both shipped their own people abroad by the boatload because there was nothing for them at home. In the 1950s, Ireland was losing more than 45,000 emigrants a year, even as its population was falling. We tend to think of Korea as impossibly far away, culturally and geographically. But the two states only recognised each other in 1983, and Ireland didn’t open an embassy in Seoul until 1989, which is almost funny given how much the two had been through in parallel.
Then Korea did the thing that Ireland is, in a sense, still trying to finish. Over roughly three decades, the economy grew at an average of nearly 10 percent per year. By the mid-1990s, real output was about 25 times what it had been in 1960. A country that exported wigs and plywood in the 1960s now exports memory chips, ships, cars, and pop music, and the firms that make them are names you know: Samsung, Hyundai, POSCO, LG. That is the miracle on the Han, and it is a rare case where the word “miracle” is doing honest work. Imagine if CRH, Ryanair, Kerry Group, and Kingspan together accounted for a substantial share of Ireland's economy. That begins to illustrate the scale of Korea's largest industrial groups.
How Korea did it matters more than the fact that they did. And this is the part that gets flattened when the story reaches Dublin, usually into a vague moral about hard work and good schools. Korea’s growth was built by the state, deliberately and often brutally. Park Chung-hee, the general who seized power in 1961, ran the economy through five-year plans and export targets. The government picked industries it wanted, then bankrolled them with cheap credit. The economist Alice Amsden called the underlying bargain reciprocity: the subsidies came with conditions attached, and a firm that missed its export numbers could lose the support that kept it alive. Korea, in Amsden’s phrase, deliberately got relative prices “wrong” to force the pace of industrialization and disciplined the companies it favored rather than simply handing them money.
And here is the detail Ireland should pay closest attention to. Korea built its own companies. It borrowed heavily from abroad, took in foreign technology, sent its engineers to be trained in American and Japanese plants, but it kept foreign ownership of its industry on a very short leash. The chaebol, for all their faults, are Korean. The profits, the patents, and the head offices stayed in the country. When Samsung climbed from making cheap televisions to leading the world in memory chips, that climb belonged to Korea.
Ireland turned outward at almost exactly the same moment, and this is the parallel that ought to make us sit up.
In 1958, a senior civil servant named T.K. Whitaker published a report, Economic Development, that argued the country could not keep hiding behind tariffs while its people emigrated. Seán Lemass, who had spent the 1930s building those very tariffs, took the argument on board as Taoiseach and dismantled much of the protection he had created. Ireland threw open the doors.
But the engine it chose was the mirror image of Korea’s. Rather than build national champions, Ireland invited the world’s champions to come and set up here, with grants, a famously low corporate tax rate that settled at 12.5 percent, an English speaking workforce, and, after 1973, a seat in the European market. And it worked, spectacularly. The multinationals came, the jobs came, and by the late 1990s, the Celtic Tiger was the envy of Europe.
This is where the two stories quietly split, and why Constitution Day deserves attention in Ireland. Korea owns its prosperity. Ireland, to a degree, reluctantly said out loud, hosts someone else’s.
The distortion is now so large that the Central Statistics Office had to invent a separate measure, modified gross national income (GNI*), just to see the real Irish economy underneath the multinational accounting. In 2024, the real economy was about 57 percent of headline GDP. The other 43 percent is, in effect, a statistical shadow cast by companies that are booking global activity through Dublin. In the same year, firms based in Ireland paid out roughly 169 billion euros in royalties and license fees to parent companies abroad. Though the jobs remain here, much of the intellectual property, as it seems, does not.
The jobs are real, and the tax receipts are real. But a great deal of the wealth is passing through rather than staying.
The clearest tell is research, because research is what lets a country keep moving up the ladder once the easy gains are gone. For every 100 euros produced by the Korean economy, roughly 5 euros is reinvested in research and development. The striking thing is that most of it is Korean firms spending Korean money on Korean problems. Ireland invests closer to 1 euro. Worse, of the business research that does happen on Irish soil, foreign-owned companies account for roughly 84 percent, and Irish-owned companies just 16 percent. Ireland seems to have become very good at hosting other people’s laboratories and much slower at building its own.
So what is the lesson, and, just as importantly, what is not? I am not going to pretend Ireland should reach for Park Chung-hee’s playbook. His Korea was a dictatorship that jailed its opponents, and the chaebol model carries real costs that Koreans themselves now argue about constantly: dangerous concentration, families controlling vast empires, an economy so dependent on a handful of firms that Samsung Electronics alone accounts for around a fifth of national research spending. A country that leans so heavily on so few companies is exposed, as Korea found out during the 1997 financial crisis. The transferable lesson is narrower and more useful than “be more like Korea.”
It is this. Treat foreign investment as a foundation, not as the finished building. Korea used foreign capital and technology as a means to an end: a domestic industry that could eventually stand on its own and overtake its teachers. Ireland has spent 60 years laying an extraordinary foundation: the deepest cluster of pharmaceutical and technology multinationals in Europe, supported by a workforce trained within those firms.
What it has been slow to do is the second move: convert that foundation into Irish-owned companies, Irish-owned patents, and Irish research that the next downturn cannot simply relocate. The corporate-tax windfall of recent years, including the 13 billion euros from the Apple ruling, is precisely the kind of money Korea would have poured into building national capacity. It could fund a serious indigenous research base, back Irish firms with the ambition to scale globally, and strengthen the universities that any homegrown industry has to draw on. Korea’s real advantage was never cheap labor or Confucian work ethic. It was a state willing to choose, invest patiently, and ask for results in return.
Bring it back to the constitution. A constitution is what a country’s written down about what it intends to become, usually before it has the means to get there. Korea wrote one in 1948 with a war on the horizon and 80 dollars a head to its name, and then spent half a century making the document true, on its own terms and with its own companies.
Ireland made its own outward turn in 1958 and grew rich on a clever, generous bet that the rest of the world would build its industries here. The bet paid off. The question Constitution Day poses, read from Dublin rather than Seoul, is what the next 50 years are for: owning the prosperity it has built, or continuing to rent it.
Korea settled that question a long time ago. Perhaps it is time Ireland did too.