In other words, as Britain self-combusts, Ireland—with its young workforce, low taxes, and English fluency—is poised to pounce.

…Ahead of the Brexit deadline, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Barclays moved their EU headquarters from London to Dublin in a bid to minimize disruption; Barclays alone has shifted some $215 billion in asset management to the Irish capital. (Both banks declined to comment on the moves.) Rivals Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs have promised to bulk up their own Dublin operations in the face of U.K. uncertainty, even as they maintain offices in the British capital.

…The ascent of Ireland as a global player and the subtle shift in power between it and the U.K. isn’t going over well with some in Britain—namely, the Brexit supporters who remain in Parliament. One Conservative member derided “the obdurate Irish government” for being overly concerned with border issues. Another was widely condemned in December for suggesting that Downing Street use the threat of economic damage, including food shortages, to compel Ireland to agree to a more favorable deal for the U.K.—an uncomfortable echo of the Great Famine of the 19th century. “We simply cannot allow the Irish to treat us this way,” an unnamed member of Parliament reportedly told a BBC columnist that same month, adding: “The Irish really should know their place.”

…The businesses moving to Dublin, Frankfurt, and Paris are not fly-by-night call centers, sweatshops, or hubs of unattractive work. Rather, they are the white-collar, green-collar, and gold-collar jobs upon which the 21st century’s economic power is being built. Ireland seems prepared to grab them all. “Small is beautiful. It keeps us agile,” says Bushnell, herself not quite 5 feet 3 inches. “We can’t scale nationally. We can only scale internationally. Instead of going wide, we are going deep. That has sent us up the value chain. We’re not call centers anymore. People are taking our calls now.”

If it sounds like the giddy optimism of millennial invincibility, that’s because it is: With a median age of 35.9, Ireland has the youngest population in the EU, putting it on par with such booming populations as those of Brazil, China, Qatar, Singapore, and Thailand. (The EU-wide median is 42.8; Germany claims the highest median age at 45.9.) “We always had cachet but were seen as riding coattails, either of the U.K. or the EU,” says Daniel Mulhall, an Irish ambassador who has served in Britain, Germany, India, and is currently ambassador to the U.S. Times have changed. “We became our own country,” he says. “We have our own ideas at last.”

…A cultural revolution has certainly helped make Ireland more internationally attractive. By referendum, Ireland last year rewrote its constitution to legalize abortion, just three years after it legalized gay marriage, also by referendum. The Irish government last year barred the Catholic Church, which controls 90% of the school system on its behalf, from admissions discrimination on religious grounds. Look no further than Taoiseach Varadkar to mark social progress; he is a gay, unmarried, 38-year-old man of Indian and Irish descent who is the head of government in a country that only decriminalized homosexuality in 1993. In the U.S., this would be the equivalent of the first black president taking office in 1888, not long after the abolition of slavery. “It’s no coincidence,” Traynor says, “that the people fighting for our future here are the ones who can still remember living in its past.”

In Brexit, Could Ireland Wear the Crown? | Fortune

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