Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the National Bank of Romania!

Today, together with the Embassy of Ireland in Romania, we have the honour of hosting a very interesting conference held by Professor Alan Ahearne, on a highly topical issue – “The impact of Brexit on the economies of Ireland and the European Union”.

Let me introduce our special guest:

Mr Alan Ahearne is Director of the Whitaker Institute and Professor of Economics at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Central Bank of Ireland, re-appointed on 8 March 2015 for a second term of five years, and Chairman of the Bank’s Risk Committee. He is Chairman of the Economic and Social Research Institute and of the Department of Finance Joint Research Programme on the Macroeconomy, Taxation & Banking. He is also a member of the External Advisory Group of Ireland’s Parliamentary Budget Office. He has served as Adviser to the IMF and as a Research Fellow at Bruegel, the influential Brussels-based think tank. He holds an honorary appointment at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia.

Professor Ahearne served as Special Adviser to Ireland’s former Minister of Finance Brian Lenihan from 2009 to 2011. In this role, he advised the Minister on economic, budgetary and financial policies in responding to the economic and financial crisis.

Professor Ahearne obtained his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (in Pittsburgh) in 1998 and subsequently joined the Federal Reserve Board in Washington DC, where he worked for seven years as a Senior Economist. At the Fed, he advised Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and other Fed Governors on developments in the global economy. He was the principal economist at the Fed covering the Japanese and Chinese economies.

He has taught economics at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Virginia, University College Dublin, Dublin City University and the University of Limerick.

Professor Ahearne's areas of expertise are macroeconomics and international finance. His research includes studies on property markets in Ireland and other industrial countries; global current account imbalances and exchange rates; and the economic performance of the euro area. In addition to being published in top academic journals, his research has been featured in The Economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Irish Times, and Sunday Business Post.

Now, I give the floor to Ambassador McGarry to address his welcoming remarks and then to professor Ahearne for his very interesting presentation.

Bucharest, 18 October 2019