This paper examines the search for an innovative economy and economic development in Ireland, a country that has both undergone a rapid period of growth and change and experienced extreme economic volatility. This paper explores this history of boom and bust through an exploration of the trajectories of the project of state developmentalism across the periods of Ireland's modern economic history. In the process, it examines the character of the shifting developmental state structures and strategies, of the ebb and flow of state developmentalism within the national political economy as a whole, and of the dilemmas of the macro-economy that continue to be posed by the incomplete, uncertain project of state developmentalism in Ireland.