Ireland needs better infrastructure if it is to remain competitive, the former British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook said yesterday.
Mr Cook said he was "very respectful" of Ireland's achievements but "you do not have the infrastructure an economy of your strength deserves".
The State deserved a "better, bigger gateway to offer the world when it comes to Dublin to do business".
Mr Cook said Ireland was "one of the few countries in Europe where you can get from one coast to the other taking in on your way so many of the towns in between.
"In an era of broadband technology, when we can transmit the entire works of James Joyce from here to Hong Kong in a nanosecond, it need not take so long to get from here to Galway."
He said he was familiar with airport congestion that kept aircraft circling while they waited to land.
"Dublin is the only airport where I've ever found congestion in the corridors as I tried to get out," he said.
Mr Cook was speaking in Dublin yesterday when he addressed the presidential lunch of the Irish Auctioneers and Valuers Institute.
He resigned as the Leader of the House of Commons in March of last year, over the British government's stance on Iraq.
Yesterday, Mr Cook said he resigned because he did not see Iraq as the threat it was supposed to be. No weapons of mass destruction were found, he said, and the war on Iraq had boosted, not diminished, international terrorism.
"We now know we had all the time in the world to let Hans Blix finish the job and tell us through a process of UN inspections that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction," he said. That could have been done without any war, he said, and could have avoided the deaths of 100,000 civilians.
Mr Cook said the US President George W Bush was a "chauvinist" and his administration had pursued a path of unilateralism for the past four years. The West had done exactly what Osama bin Laden had hoped for when it responded to the September 11th attacks.
"We have given a free propaganda gift to al-Qaeda," he said. "For me, the greatest imperative of the 21st century is finding an alternative relationship between the Western world and Islam, based on mutual respect for our two great cultures."
Mr Cook also said that Ireland's thinking on the euro was ahead of Britain's and "personally I think Britain would be wise to follow where Ireland has led".
He said there was "a real economic price" for staying out of the euro. "Britain used to be the largest destination for inward investment to Europe. Our share of all the inward investment coming to Europe is now only one-fifth of the level before the creation of the euro," he said.
"Britain will join the euro," Mr Cook predicted, but it would join too late to shape developments.
