Is Ireland's First New Town in Hundreds of Years?

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The village of shannon was ireland's first new town in hundreds of years. The airport and its industrial zone were in the middle of nowhere. In many ways, shannon's industrial free zone anticipated the low tax, freemarket global economy of the 19 eighties. But at the time, o'regan viewed the entire shannon experiment in explicitly colonial terms.

On the west coast of Ireland, on the banks of an estuary dividing county Limerick from county Clare, lies a small town called Shannon. But Shannon is not a quaint fishing village or farming community. Its industry is its airport. And Shannon Airport is big. It handles up to 1.7 million passengers and 20,000 flights a year, most of them from other countries. It looks like a cosmopolitan international airport, but it has a unique claim to fame: the world's first airport duty-free store.

Today, the store has what you would expect -- designer perfumes, jewelry and various fine foods, with a lot of local (in this case Irish) products in particular. But like the area around the airport, the shop started out small, with a local boy from the area who would go on to change the world of tax-free commerce in and beyond Shannon.

Call of Duty: Free