Irish goods exports are running 4pc higher in the first quarter of this year against the pre-Covid fourth quarter of 2019, despite the disruptions from Brexit, at a time when Germany and France have yet to recover to their pre-pandemic levels.

That’s quite a contrast to the doom and gloom that had been expected as the pandemic hit and the Department of Finance had projected an 8pc decline in exports in 2020 compared with an actual outcome that saw sales of goods overseas rise by 6pc in the year.

The Department’s fears were well-founded. After all, the last major global pandemic – the 1918-20 influenza outbreak that killed 50 million people in the wake of World War I – helped usher in an era of global tariff barriers and protectionism.

“Contrary to fears when the pandemic struck, openness to trade turned out to be a strength, not a weakness,” Daniel Kral of consultancy Oxford Economics wrote in a report last week.

“The rebound in goods exports among the most open European economies tended to far outpace rebounds in gross domestic product, particularly in the small central and eastern European economies or Ireland, meaning they are now even more open than prior to the pandemic.”

The export outperformance comes from multinationals producing pharmaceuticals and information technology goods – the same companies who helped fill the Exchequer with far more in tax revenues than projected last year.

Which begs the question: If offshoring has been dead for a decade, why has Ireland thrived? Goods export data measures products that actually move across borders and not the financial shenanigans from shifting intra-company assets on- and off-shore that is seen in the balance of payments figures.

The answer may well be that the era of “hyperglobalisation” between 1986 and 2008 – when the ratio of world trade to world GDP almost doubled and China emerged as a low-cost export giant – is now indeed at end.

What we now have instead of cheap labour offshoring is an increasing amount of trade taking place as a result of global value chains occurring between advanced economies.

A particularly good example of this is BMW’s huge plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Even as Donald Trump stoked his trade war rhetoric, BMW was investing hundreds of millions of euro in a facility that was already the single largest car exporter in the US.

The next time you see a German SUV barrelling down the country roads of Ireland, that’s where it came from.

Just as the BMW plant has helped spark a high-tech industrial renaissance in a once-poor southern US state, so the pharma and ICT companies in Ireland have now established high technology clusters of their own that draw in other investments.

These investments are not aimed at seeking out the lowest available labour costs across the world, which is just as well because Ireland’s hourly wage average of €32.30 is bang in line with that of the eurozone.

According to Harvard University economics professor Pol Antras that also means, “given the sunk costs associated with the current geography of worldwide production, it will take persistent and significant shifts in competitiveness for firms to want to reshore activity to their own domestic economies”.

That’s good news, not only for jobs and exports, but also for the country’s tax base, which the Government has said is under threat from proposed changes to the global regime and that Ireland could lose €800m-€2bn in company tax revenues.

But if these firms are going to find it costly to disentangle their production, they aren’t likely to flee. And to put the potential losses in context, corporation tax revenues overshoot forecasts by €1.1bn in most ‘normal’ years (€1.4bn in 2019).

If nothing else works, the 15pc global minimum tax that Ireland so resolutely opposes may well do the trick.

The EU Tax Observatory, a body that supports the minimum tax, says Ireland would gain €7.2bn under those rules.