Professor Terrence McDonough:

There is a famous controversy in the economic history of the US as to whether railroads were key to the development of the interior of the country. The argument is that had the railroads not been there, people would have dug canals, therefore railroads were not key. One cannot make such an argument very convincingly. While it is probably true that other conduits would have been found for bringing finance into the Irish economy, the IFSC was a very important conduit for it in practice.