FORMER TAOISEACH John Bruton has sought to reassure a Wall Street audience that Ireland is “still a prosperous country”.

Mr Bruton, delivering a speech at BNY Mellon, a US investment management company, insisted yesterday that “people have money – they are not spending it, but they have it.”

He also said, in an interview with The Irish Times later, that the new Government would find “a mature electorate” who realised that “serious mistakes were made – not only by their government, but to some extent even by themselves in some borrowings that they undertook.”

Mr Bruton, who now serves as chairman of IFSC Ireland, claimed that European authorities had not yet accepted their share of the blame for Ireland’s economic crash. He said the European Central Bank “had certain powers that don’t seem to have been used”.

“They had information about disproportionate increases in house prices and in banking activities in certain parts of the EU market. One has to ask – what did they do about it?”

Mr Bruton’s criticism is particularly striking, since he served as the EU’s first ambassador to the US from 2004 to 2009.

During the speech, the former taoiseach made a vigorous defence of Ireland’s low corporate tax rate. “The 12.5 per cent tax rate is the basis upon which we constructed our particular development model more than 50 years ago. Nobody can insist on us changing it.”

Mr Bruton also sought to remedy what he claimed was a mischaracterisation of the tense summit between Taoiseach Enda Kenny and other EU leaders last week.

He insisted the divergence of views did not concern the corporate tax rate per se, but rather a request from French president Nicolas Sarkozy that Ireland “constructively engage” in discussions on the issue.

“ ‘Constructively engage’ is a phrase which means almost nothing,” Mr Bruton said, “but Enda Kenny was so determined not to allow even the slightest doubt about anything to do with our corporate tax rate that he wouldn’t even agree to a request that he constructively engage.”

He believed “some formula” of words would be found to satisfy European leaders on the issue within the next month, but such a formula would merely “allow Ireland to say that we will talk about this, although we have no intention of ever agreeing to it”.

Although Mr Bruton took a step back from party politics when he became EU ambassador seven years ago, he made some political points yesterday.

Sinn Féin had, in recent years, attracted considerable support in the US but Mr Bruton reminded his audience of businesspeople that it was, in his view, “a hard-left party, [with] very populist, anti-business economic policies and foreign policy views that would not be favourably received by either Democrats or Republicans.”

He also sounded a note of caution for the new Government and the coalition’s huge Dáil majority. “They are going to have to work very closely together to avoid differences becoming difficulties.”