There was a wobbly moment in 2001 or so, before the property bubble got going, when the Celtic Tiger boom looked to be ending. A big part of the original Celtic Tiger boom was manufacturing PCs. PC makers like Dell, Hewlett Packard, Compaq, Gateway 2000, Intel and Ericsson employed tens of thousands between them.  By 2001 those companies were looking wobbly because the market was turning against them. They had two problems. First, the end of the Dotcom bubble made capital scarcer and more precious. Second, the PC business was getting commoditised. In the previous decade, in the 1990s, PC…

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