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Home Page > Blogs > News blogs > Periscope > Ireland on the road to recovery says Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore ----A night to remember at Irish America Wall Street 50 Awards

Periscope by Niall O'Dowd

Ireland on the road to recovery says Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore ----A night to remember at Irish America Wall Street 50 Awards

Posted on Friday, September 23, 2011 at 08:39 AM

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Minister Eamon Gilmore speaking at the Irish America event

Our annual Wall Street 50 event held at the New York Yacht Club last night was a stellar success, featuring the best and brightest of the Irish on Wall Street.

Over 300 of the best of the Irish on Wall Street gathered for our Irish America Magazine event.

Highlight of the night was the speech of chief honoree Brian Ruane of BNY/Mellon, who oversees 1,800 employees in the company's Irish offices as well as running their hedge fund strategy from New York.

Far from downgrading Ireland, Ruane sees potential for expansion there and pointed to a dedicated and well educated workforce that can help Ireland again become a major player in international finance.

Ruane was bullish on the Irish economy, and he is a man who should know.

It was a welcome respite from the prophets of doom and gloom who populate the Irish air and media space every day.

Also bullish was Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore, who delivered a stem winder speech noting that Ireland was fighting back after its near economic collapse.

He pointed to a GDP rise of 1.6 per cent over the past three months and a host of positive articles in the world media, including the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal proclaiming that Ireland was on its way back.

He noted the contrast with his first few months in office when the weekly bulletins he read on news coverage about Ireland was depressing in the extreme.

Gilmore is helping lead a government that has got the optics right, that is straightforward and is not massaging figures or telling porkies about Ireland's real situation.

That honesty and willingness to talk straight about the problems and solutions has resulted in a markedly better press for Ireland in recent months and sense that a corner has been turned.

There are clear signs that the bottom had finally been reached in the bank bailout saga also he noted.

Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, head of the Democratic Governor's Association and a potential candidate for president in 2016 was also effusive in his praise of Ireland getting its story straight and beginning a major comeback.

He stated he never doubted the Irish spirit and resolve to put matters right.

The night I think, marked a turning point, a sense that there was reason for optimism about Ireland's prospects after a long dark night.

The caliber of the 2011 class was exceptional "This year's honorees are among the best and the brightest Irish America has ever had the pleasure of celebrating. They have a lot riding on their shoulders in these turbulent economic times, but their
accomplishments and determination assure me that we are in safe hands," said Patricia Harty, editor and co-founder of Irish America magazine.

Honorees included some of the leading lights on Wall Street, some of whom came from as far away as Boston, California, Ireland and Philadelphia,

Prudential's Barbra Koster filled a table with female colleagues, four of whom had flown in from the subsidiary in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal for the occasion.

An incredible musical interlude was provided by violinist John Kelly, CEO of the Irish Chamber Orchestra which will be performing at Lincoln Center on October 31st.

All in all a night to remember

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citizen69 | Sep 24, 2011, 10:31 AM EDT

Good to see it but i have a fear the double dip recession will put a spanner in the works not only in Ireland but around the globe.

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sirpeter | Sep 24, 2011, 06:30 AM EDT

mamaginnty. I didn't go in at all.I'll be going out to-night and Sunday.I couldn't take 3 nights in a row at all.haha.Getting old is a terrible thing.

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jacersagain | Sep 24, 2011, 06:26 AM EDT

(... more) I think a lot of people, an awful lot of people in fact, need to wake up and get real, to stop wearing rose- or shamrock-tinted glasses and well-worn-down IMF-labelled boots and see how our world is, in its real ways. In the real world, EVERY body tows a line for EVERY fellow human being without a sucking or a bleeding of their fellow humans’ abilities. Wake up – a new dawn of thinking is breaking in Ireland, just as it is in the Arab and African and Asian world (but on different levels of thinking) ... It should be so in the rest of the world, especially those who think they believe in the concept of money and its false predictions of recovery for those who still don’t accept that poverty exists because of their actions. So please Niall, next time you are privileged to be in the company of those who have the results of the bleeding ordinary people’s resources, tell them that. Tell them that jacersagain told you to tell them and if they ask you who jacersagain is, tell them all that jacersagain will be happy to meet them, just to bollick them face to face with truth. They should prepare themselves to meet me openly... with the simple protection of trepidation.

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jacersagain | Sep 24, 2011, 06:15 AM EDT

(...more ...*tired sigh*) A single proof of this is in the fact that just as everyone is born penniless, everyone dies penniless; in case you didn’t know, as you breathe your last breath of human life and die, you will have no money, whatever riches or monies you might have accumulated during your lifetime. The road to world recovery lies solely in peoples’ own endeavours, own bartering and exchanging of own talents and produced goods, for themselves, for their families and for fellow members of mankind. Oil companies should know that horses, like people, still exist and that people can live without their selfish explorations and extractions from our conjoined, shareable earth. Bodies like the IMF are quaking in their boots (oh yes, they wear stomping boots; boots that are well sole-lessly wearing out thin within ordinary people’s sharp understandings of what they are doing soul-lessly) because they’ve realised that they too might not have what they think they have (Ms Legarde of the IMF is being right-selfishly frightfully firing out warnings that they (the IMF) might be broke too, have nothing left to give to struggling countries and therefore having nothing to extract from our world countries for their own ridiculous salaries) and benefits. How do you think the IMF and such bodies and their employees would recover when they’ve realised that what they’ve thought that they been making hay out of, is something that doesn’t exist? (more...)

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jacersagain | Sep 24, 2011, 05:39 AM EDT

(...more) Well, I’ve got news for you Niall, and for Mr. Ruane and for Mr. Gilmore: Money Doesn’t Exist. Nope, it ain’t there in our world. The concept of Money, like the rubbishable concepts of Time and Space, was invented by our mankind species to bring some kind of order to the world that we live in, and we all know that mankind is totally, utterly and completely fallible (that includes me and you and whoever else is reading this post), not to mention what scientists in Europe were shocked to find... that there’s something else that exists on our own planet that moves faster than the speed of light and that therefore Einstein’s theory of relativity was wrong (I always sincerely believed Einstein was wrong, I just didn’t have the means to prove it; I still don’t and I still don’t believe in his theory). There are no pennies in Heaven, despite what a well-known movie insinuates that they come from, and despite what the American Dream assumes is there to pursue. (More...)

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jacersagain | Sep 24, 2011, 05:16 AM EDT

Jaysus Niall! I’m awake here this morning in Ireland’s fresh air, beside Dublin's sea, writing on this clear-sky sunny dawning morning, just after breaking fast. I have to ask “What were ya drinking, what spectacles were ya wearing, what influence were you under on that night of speeches??” Even the birds of the air in Ireland know that Ireland is financially broke and that only people who run conglomerates like those run by bullishly greedy speculators like Mr. Ruane and that Greek git Soros and his conglomerate companies AND like over-paid politicians like Irish Minister Gilmore, who, with his ingratiating, smarming, happy-to-suck Irish people’s taxes for an over-paid salary and pension despite being a "Socialist" Labour Party member, is telling all Irish people like me that we have to tow the line and be subject to reductions of qualities of life in all areas of life, including healthcare, are being confident in the road to recovery of..... of, of, of... what? Making more money? (More... Very Seriously More Stuff from jacers...)

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mamaginnty | Sep 23, 2011, 08:17 PM EDT

On road to recovery while in the states. Back here in Ireland he tells us we are in for very hard times ahead. The bulls not in the soup sirpeter but spewing from the mouth. oh, did you get the guinnesss last night, heard there was great craic in Cork.

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sirpeter | Sep 23, 2011, 05:24 PM EDT

Eamon Gilmore! a fine broth of a boy.Lets hope there was no Irish bull in that soup ye were drinking.

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