Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

He could be a very good junior Minister. He put down a number of questions here. He wanted to discuss unemployment and growth, banking and sovereign debt and trade and services. He asked if I held private meetings with counterparts at the Davos World Economic Forum, whether I had any discussion on Ireland's housing and property sector there and whether I had any discussion on the transatlantic trade and investment partnership.

Perhaps the Deputy thinks different meetings take place, but the forum is a structured occasion and one makes arrangements to meet particular personnel in whom the country might have an interest in terms of investment or further job opportunities. As I said in response to Deputy Martin, the forum began with a reception and an occasion hosted by the professor who has been running the forum for the past 30 years. The following day, I had meetings with Citigroup, Facebook and Adobe. We discussed the question of the new European context in which Ireland is an example of a country in very difficult circumstances dealing with a horrendous legacy. We have made significant progress and have exited the bailout programme and published an economic medium-term strategy which is working and to which we will adhere.

I also met senior personnel from Takeda from Liberty Global and from Salesforce and participated in a panel discussion with the President of the European Commission, the Secretary General of the OECD, the chief executive of Siemens and the Prime Minister of Sweden, the then Minister for the Economy. I followed this with an engagement, organised by the IDA, with senior investment personnel in the country. I met the Treasury Secretary from the United States and met with people from the New York Stock Exchange, Bank of America, Bloomberg and so on.

It was not a case of organising meetings about inequality, nor was it a case of arriving by helicopter. I arrived by bus and by car and walked around the streets, as I always do. The Deputy can forget about the days of an Ireland where people were flying around with doors falling off helicopters in their anxiety to get things opened. We live in a different world now. There was no discussion at Davos about the Dublin housing situation. The situation that occurred here was not caused by Davos. It was caused by light touch regulation, greed, incompetence, mismanagement and by the fact that the country, through a combination of these things and bad banking -----

See this speech in context