The main street of Leixlip in County Kildare looks as if it hasn't changed for decades. There are a handful of pubs, framed with cheerfully painted woodwork and festooned with neatly kept flower boxes. There are a news agent, a few Chinese takeout places, a betting parlor and shops--many with the pebble-dash storefronts so familiar in the Irish countryside--to buy carpet, tiles and other household fixtures. On summer nights, local teenagers sit on benches and stone walls, much as their parents did. While the population of 15,000 makes the town the largest in the county, there is no movie theater, mall or McDonald's to hang out at.

And yet half a mile up the road on the outskirts of town sits one of the most sophisticated manufacturing facilities in the world. The Intel Ireland campus, built on a 371-acre plot of land that was once a horse farm, has been in operation since 1993, approximately the year that the Irish economy turned into the famed "Celtic Tiger." Since then, Intel has invested some $7 billion, and the facility has produced more than a billion microchips. The factory has 5,500 people on the payroll, making it the largest private employer in Ireland. Instead of being a bedroom community for Dublin, a mere 11 miles to the east, Leixlip has a good number of Intel workers who live in Dublin and commute here. Earlier this year, the plant began making Intel's most important product offering since the Pentium chip, using 65-nanometer manufacturing processing and allowing for yet more data to be stored on yet tinier pieces of silicon.

The Leixlip factory is by far the largest in Europe--remarkable, given that the entire population of Ireland, just over 4 million, is about half the size of London's, or just a little bigger than Berlin's. Intel itself can hardly fathom the success. "Could we have ever forecast such phenomenal growth?" asks Trevor Holmes, Intel Ireland's head of government and public affairs. "I don't think so."

The growth of Intel inside Ireland echoes the explosion of Ireland's economy as a whole. In the 12 years up to 1993, the economy expanded a cumulative 60%, or the equivalent of 2.4% annually. In the 10 years after 1993, the economy grew a cumulative 96%, the equivalent of a whopping 7% a year. European Union subsidies and foreign investors--including Bristol-Myers Squibb, Dell, HP, Microsoft, eBay and SAP--have provided much of the momentum, but the Irish have benefited enormously. As recently as 1985, nearly 1 Irish worker in 5 was out of work; today unemployment stands at 4%, by most definitions full employment. Ireland boasts the highest per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in the E.U.: nearly $38,000.

Such numbers are staggering to those who remember the recent past, the brain-drain era of the '70s and '80s, when anyone with talent fled Ireland as quickly as possible. Today the streets of Dublin are clogged with tourists and well-to-do locals, who flock to shopping meccas like Henry Street or, on the edge of the capital, the Liffey Valley Shopping Centre, a 90-store mall. The brain drain has reversed into a brain gain; many Irish emigrants to the U.S. are returning, and so many Poles have moved here that it's common to hear Polish spoken in the local pub (see sidebar).