{"id":208587,"date":"2025-06-23T20:48:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-23T20:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/208587\/"},"modified":"2025-06-23T20:48:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-23T20:48:10","slug":"brexit-was-single-stupidest-thing-a-countrys-ever-done-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/208587\/","title":{"rendered":"Brexit was \u2018single stupidest thing a country\u2019s ever done\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brexit <\/a>was \u201cthe single stupidest thing any country\u2019s ever done,\u201d businessman and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has said.<\/p>\n

Speaking at an event to launch Bloomberg\u2019s new offices in Dublin, Mr Bloomberg said part of Ireland\u2019s recent economic success had come courtesy of Brexit with more companies choosing to locate their European headquarters here because of the UK\u2019s departure.<\/p>\n

He said 20 of the top 25 financial services companies had hubs in Ireland alongside most of the top US tech firms.<\/p>\n

The three-time mayor of New City and founder of Bloomberg media group also claimed that Ireland and the US had switched roles economically.<\/p>\n

\u201cIreland is the one that\u2019s growing and America is the one that\u2019s worried about growth,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The US, he said, was in a difficult situation politically and that he had been as surprised as anyone to find out the US had bombed Iran over the weekend.<\/p>\n

He also claimed that the current Washington administration was in danger of throwing away the political and economic capital the US had built up over decades with other countries.<\/p>\n

\"\"Bobby Healy on why Manna drone delivery could be the \u2018biggest technology company in the world for its space\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cAmerica has just spent the last 70 years trying to build relationships with other countries … and we\u2019re throwing away a lot of that … which I can\u2019t explain,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Mr Bloomberg said he was not a supporter of the current US government and disagreed strongly with the policies being pursued by President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough I know Donald Trump and I\u2019ve known him for 30 or 40 years … when I was mayor of New York, he was a real estate developer in New York City and only went bankrupt six times,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Mr Bloomberg, who ran for the US presidency as a Democrat in 2020, has had a tetchy relationship with Mr Trump.<\/p>\n

He has previously called in a \u201cpathological liar\u201d and a \u201cbarking clown\u201d while Mr Trump deprecatingly refers to him as \u201cMini Mike\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s a pleasant guy if you sat and had dinner with him, having said that I don\u2019t agree with his policies at all,\u201d Mr Bloomberg said.<\/p>\n

Highlighting the deeply partisan nature of the US politics, he said he had endeavoured to keep Bloomberg as editorially balanced as possible \u201cwith the same number of conversative and liberal reporters\u201d while staying out of politics himself. <\/p>\n

He said Bloomberg had doubled its Irish workforce to 150 in the last two years and the Dublin office located in the recently developed Charlemont Square scheme in Dublin city centre was now one of its largest in Europe.<\/p>\n

The Dublin office has plans to take on a further 25 staff, mainly in the engineering category.<\/p>\n

Mr Bloomberg claimed Ireland\u2019s success in attracting business was partly down to the high level of students entering STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) courses.<\/p>\n

At 32 per cent, he said this was double the rate of US students going into science and technology courses and the highest rate in the European Union in per capita terms.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo it\u2019s not just the regulatory environment that is attractive to employers here. First and foremost it\u2019s the quality of the workforce, educated, skilled, English-speaking,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Also speaking at the event was Minister for Finance Paschal Donohue, who highlighted the strength of Ireland\u2019s public finances despite the wider global turmoil.<\/p>\n

He noted that up to \u20ac15 billion will be set aside in the State\u2019s two savings funds by the end of this year.<\/p>\n

Asked how corporate tax receipts had performed in June following a surprise drop in May, Mr Donohoe said he had a \u201csense of where they are\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look at where we are overall, we\u2019ve seen so far another strong performance overall, year-to-date,\u201d he said, noting this was the reason why the country had been running healthy budget surpluses.<\/p>\n

Mr Donohoe warned again that up to 75,000 jobs may be lost or not created over the next three years – with 1-1.5 percentage points knocked off growth – if EU-US tariff talks fail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brexit was \u201cthe single stupidest thing any country\u2019s ever done,\u201d businessman and former New York City mayor Michael…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208588,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[3662,802,748,32,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-208587","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-bloomberg","9":"tag-brexit","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-eu","13":"tag-europe","14":"tag-european","15":"tag-european-union","16":"tag-great-britain","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114734648792677060","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}