Former US president Bill Clinton has announced plans to host a special summit meeting in New York to attract increased investment into Ireland.
Speaking at the second day of the Global Irish Economic Forum in Dublin last night, Mr Clinton told delegates that Ireland could do much more to maximise foreign investment by targeting senior business leaders from outside the traditional diaspora.
In particular, he said the country should begin to focus more on emerging markets such as India and Brazil, whose economies are expanding rapidly.
In what was an upbeat speech, Mr Clinton emphasised that Ireland “still had a lot going for it” and said the world thought more highly of the country than many Irish people did.
“I know a lot of people in Ireland are discouraged, but the rest of the world thinks Ireland is pretty great. He says Ireland has to play on that,” he said.
While foreign investment would help Ireland emerge from the financial crisis, he said there was no “silver bullet’.
Instead, the road to recovery will lie in taking a broad range of imaginative steps such providing more credit to smaller businesses, large-scale public works to make buildings more eco-friendly and “crowd-sourcing” initiatives to raise finance for start-up firms.
"This is just unfortunately not one of those things where somebody can come in and give a speech and somebody else can go and pass a law and everything is hunky dory," he said, "There are dozens and dozens of things we need to do and those things need to be worked out by people like you working together and exploring options and seeing how to do them."
On the Government’s handling of the financial crisis, Mr Clinton said bailing out the banks and been the right decision because it increased confidence among prospective investors.
“And I’m sure it made a lot of people mad because they thought we’re helping people who profited out of our misery. It was the right decision.”
Mr Clinton advised Ireland to implement more aggressive Government policies to attract manufacturing back into the country, target opportunities in emerging markets and to chase investment from American-based multi-nationals which have significant cash reserves.
“Target the companies rolling in the dough,” he said.
Also speaking at the forum, Taoiseach Enda Kenny pledged that the Government will turn the ideas and proposals that emerged during the course of two-day seminar into concrete actions.
As well as establishing a special group to implement the forum's findings, Mr Kenny said the Government will review what progress has been made within the next 100 days.
