The Irish are some ofthe hardest working and caring people on the face ofthe Earth, they have had a short sharp lesson ofthe power ofmodernworld economics whilst making huge strides in their quality of life and they will be better for it.
During apartheid, boycotts targeting the country's racist policies had isolated its wine-making industry from the rest oftheworld, which meant that modern cultivation techniques, foreign varietals and rich export markets were all effectively off-limits.
Industrial producers and land planners should draw some lessons from the natural disasters of 2011 about where to site factories and supply chain partners as well as making plans to detect and rapidly recover from the risks of future shortages of critical products for our modern digital world.