David McWilliams – voted by the World Economic Forum as one of the 250 Most Influential Young Thinkers in the World. He is author of The Pope’s Children and writes two weekly opinion columns in the Irish Independent and the Sunday Business Post.

A regular on Irish television and radio since the award winning Agenda on TV3, he presented the David McWilliams Breakfast Show on Newstalk, The Big Bite on RTE and has interviewed some of the most influential and thought provoking characters of our age, from Henry Kissinger to Mikhail Gorbachev, Rudi Guilianni and Hillary Clinton.

Educated at Trinity College Dublin and the College of Europe Bruges in Belgium, he spent ten years in banking including time as an economist with the Irish Central Bank and investment banking with UBS where he was appointed the youngest Director ever at the age of 27 and was the first economist to predict the 1990s boom in Ireland which later became known as the “Celtic Tiger”.