Whatever may happen during the year ahead - and economic and political uncertainties are greater now than at any time in the recent past - it is clear that there will not at any stage be a return to the kind of boom conditions we in Ireland experienced between 1993 and 2001. That was a unique period in our economic history - one that, indeed, has no parallel in the economic history of any other industrialised country.
Nevertheless, if we master our current inflation by avoiding excessive pay increases in the period immediately ahead, it is quite likely that our economic growth rate in the second half of this decade will still be in the region of 4 per cent to 5 per cent a year. That would still be about twice the rate that other EU countries are likely to experience.
Already our per capita output, measured in GNP terms, is likely this year to be about one-eighth higher than the EU average, so that a further period of somewhat faster growth than our partners would move us near to the top of the member-states in terms of output per head.
Why was our economic growth in the 1993-2001 period so extraordinarily rapid? Basically this happened because of a remarkable coincidence of high demand for, and supply of, labour in Ireland during those years.
Up to 1995, the growth of our economy derived mainly from a rapid increase in exports to the European Community market by multinational companies that had chosen to locate here - together with the development of business services for these firms, and, of course, the servicing of the consumer needs of the growing manufacturing workforce thus being created. But since 1995, many of these firms have increasingly been using Ireland as a base from which to export to other parts of the world, and this process has, of course, helped to accelerate the growth of output in these high-tech sectors of our economy.
Exports of computers both to the Far East and to other parts of the world, and of other electrical equipment to the Far East, have grown enormously since the mid-1990s, and the total value of such exports last year reached €5.5 billion.
By contrast, the more rapid rise in the total value of exports to the United States than to the EU in recent years has been due solely to the exceptional value of our Viagra exports. These have a disproportionately high value in relation to the employment their manufacture provides here, reflecting their exceptional profitability.
But these and other factors that have been creating an exceptional demand for labour here could not have given us an annual growth rate of 8 per cent if we had not been in a position during precisely this period to provide 4 per cent to 5 per cent additional workers each year. It was a matter of simple good luck that our labour supply happened to be capable of rapid expansion at precisely that moment - the only moment in our history when Irish labour in Ireland has been in such strong demand.
Why did our workforce grow so rapidly between 1993 and 2001?
Firstly, uniquely among European countries, our birth rate increased during the 1970s, so the number of young people completing their education rose in the 1990s.
During much of that decade, our ratio of annual school-leavers to people already at work was about two-thirds higher than in the rest of the EU.
Secondly, from the early 1990s onwards, there was an exceptional flow into the labour force of women who had previously been working at home - one that was combined with a very low rate of withdrawal from the workforce by younger women, a pattern that reflected a marked pattern of postponement by young women of child-bearing until after the age of 30. As a result, during these years the Irish female workforce grew several times more rapidly than elsewhere in the EU.
Thirdly, in 1993 we had a bigger pool of unemployment than most other EU countries from which we were able to draw down workers as the demand for labour grew. In proportion to our size, during the following eight years this source yielded a supplement to our workforce four times larger than in the rest of the EU.
Finally, because of high emigration in the late 1980s, Ireland, uniquely, had a large body of recent emigrants, many of them willing and anxious to return home once jobs were available.
Because of this remarkable combination of four different factors during these eight years, Ireland was able between 1993 and 2001 to expand its labour force five times faster than the rest of the EU, and to increase numbers at work six times as fast.
None of this is ever going to happen again. The numbers leaving the education system are starting to fall and will drop by something approaching one-third between now and 2015. The proportion of women in their 20s in our labour force is already as high as or higher than elsewhere in the EU, and those who postponed child-bearing during the past 10 years have recently been starting to have babies. The temporary withdrawal of some of these new mothers from the labour force will partly offset whatever further increase may yet take place in the number of older married women in paid employment.
Although unemployment has risen during the last 18 months, and will increase further as we await an economic recovery, the resultant small pool of workless people is and will remain too small to provide a significant boost to employment when that recovery takes place.
Finally, most of the emigrants who have wanted to return home may already have done so, and many of the remainder may find it increasingly difficult to find housing here that they can afford.
When a recovery does eventually start, by drawing down for a brief period whatever surplus labour capacity may have accumulated during this downturn, we may be able temporarily to achieve a growth rate of up to 6 per cent.
But over the next eight or 10 years, we are not going to have the labour capacity that would be needed to expand our economy annually by an average of more than 4 per cent to 5 per cent. And by the end of this decade, a growth rate of even 4 per cent may be difficult to achieve.
Whether we can generate a rate of demand for our labour that will sustain these more modest growth rates will, of course, depend on our collective capacity to bring rapidly under control the inflation generated by unwise budgetary policies in the 2000-2002 periods - an inflation that is currently threatening to undermine our competitiveness.
If we succeed in getting this right, our output per head should continue for the rest of this decade to rise even further beyond the EU average.
This will enable us to create an infrastructure appropriate to our needs, and, as that task is completed, we ought to be able to reduce the very high proportion of our output that we at present allocate to investment.
That would facilitate improvements in public services and also a further rise in average living standards. A rise, hopefully, that will be better distributed than in the past so as to meet the still neglected needs of the disadvantaged within our community.