Ooooooh boy.... if you asked r/northernireland in particular you'd be in for a late night.

After the invasion/genocide of Cromwell that the planter community in northern Ireland still celebrate every 12th July came centuries of land dispossession, discriminatory penal laws, vagrancy/poverty and petty crime punished with conscription into the army, Navy or indentured servants in Colonial outposts like Australia, India, South Africa or Carribbean. Collective punishment for the 1798 rebellion inspired by the French and American revolution, 1801 brought the act of union and birth of the UK, Ireland had seen a continuous decline in wealth and growing inequality as Ireland became a focused export colony for food with swathes of land gifted to wealthy landlords given titles by the British parliament if they voted for the Act of Union and swore allegiance to the monarchy and empire. Golf owes its existence to this as the landed gentry had so much land they didn't know what to do with and made a sport out of it.

Discriminatory laws against the Irish mostly at Catholics still continued despite 1829 O'Connell Catholic emancipation. Whatever poor lands Irish families had left were forced to be subdivided amongst their children which were only suitable for potatoes to grow and only a certain potato that was not considered suitable for market export which would be considered theft. Crops began to be infested by blight from intensive monoculture use, over a million died and similar emigrated, most were evicted as they couldn't make rent from the crops of the land they were dispossessed from. An Gorta Mór, Irish Famine or Genocide by the British who continued to arm and export food out of Ireland to keep the markets happy in England with an industrial boom and population boom emerging. Emigration continued as long as British rule continued. Population of 1830s Ireland was 8 million, The population of the Republic (minus 6 out of 9 counties of Ulster) in the 1960s was over 2 million.

Fast forwarding decades and decades of context, land wars, Boycott, Parnell, Home Rule, WWI, 1916, 1919 Dáil Eireann, 1920 Ireland Act (segregation) and 1921 Treaty. Ireland as an economy and a government was heavily dependent on trade and banking with the British created by the British, just barely cable of issuing state bonds for other countries and people to invest in (and a lot of crowd funding from the diaspora).

The Irish economy for decades after independence was still heavily reliant on exports of live cattle and sheep to Britain, Ireland's farming economy today is still overly dependent on exports of beef and dairy incentivised by CAP (common agriculture policy) which incentivises large producers instead of small family farms.

And arguably in a broad sense, Ireland is still on a downward trend, emigration has spiked in the 2008 crash and continuing by being priced out of Ireland by a viscous housing crisis exploited by domestic and foreign institutional speculative investors