New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg's take on all things Irish

It’s a western place, friendly, typical, hard-working. My former wife is British. Her father was a career officer in the RAF and he used to talk about the difference in people in the U.K. They don’t move very easily if their job is an hour away. They’d say, ‘Oh there’s no jobs.’

(In Ireland,), it’s not a culture where they sit back and depend on the government to do things. There’s an understanding that you’re responsible for your own success.

So are you convinced that they will come out of this recession?

Yeah. Something will happen, I don’t know when. I just don’t know what it takes to get Ireland out of this. They don’t have a lot of the over-building Spain has. Spain has got a much bigger problem.

They do have the advantage of a culture and the language. The only danger in Northern Ireland is the peace thing.

But overall, it’s an exporting country and if the rest of the world slowly stops buying things, because the leverage of a smaller country, they get badly hurt.

I’m more optimistic on America in the very short term. Actually England has a bigger problem that Ireland. It’s not obviously in percentages, but England has a lot of over-building.

What are your priorities for your new term, if you are elected? 

Number one -- continue the schools, and the one thing we can do to eliminate or ameliorate most of our social problems is a better education.

Somebody once said to (New York City schools chancellor) Joel Klein, “They’ll never fix education until you end poverty.’ And he said, ‘No no, you got it wrong, you’ll never end poverty until you fix education.’

And I think the latter is true. The former is what advocates who want to send money want to believe, but that’s not the case. And so keeping with education, we have reduced by 50% the gap between between black and Latino kids and white and Asian kids.

And you can say, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not black, I’m not Latino.’ Well, those kids are going to be the voters of tomorrow and they’re going to be the ones supporting Social Security, so you have a big public interest in improving the public schools of today. That’s one thing.

Continue to keep crime down. And during the Dinkins years, the murder rate got up to 2,200 a year. Now it’s down to 500. And Giuliani made some big strides. 

And we continued to diversify, tried to get us away from Wall Street, not that we don’t love Wall Street, but you want to have other industries. So we are a bigger fashion capital than Paris, we have double the number of fashion houses here. The media capital of the world. Getting to the information technology, biotech, right down the list.

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