BELFAST, Northern Ireland — New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg forecast Thursday that Belfast would become a leading hub for global investment within a decade.
But that can happen, he said, only if the city tears down dozens of Berlin Wall-style barriers that still divide Irish Catholic and British Protestant.
Bloomberg addressed leaders of Northern Ireland's Catholic-Protestant administration and more than 100 potential U.S. corporate investors.
The venue: A conference marking the first anniversary of the revival of power-sharing, the central dream of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord.
The unlikely leaders of the coalition government, First Minister Ian Paisley, a Protestant preacher, and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander, greeted Bloomberg on the steps of Stormont Parliamentary Building in east Belfast.
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Paisley and McGuinness invited U.S. political and business leaders to Belfast to push for increased American investment.
Also participating in the sales pitch were British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Ireland's newly elected Prime Minister Brian Cowen.
Bloomberg said Belfast was uniquely positioned to benefit from a combination of British, Irish and American good will and money.
He praised the Titanic Quarter, Belfast's effort to develop its own financial district in long-derelict docklands where the ill-fated luxury liner was built nearly a century ago.
Bloomberg said the quarter "is loaded with investment opportunity, and the plans for it remind me very much of what we are trying to do on Manhattan's Far West Side."
"I would be willing to bet that a decade from now, the Dublin-London-Belfast triangle could be one of the largest and most competitive financial hubs in the world — if, if the political situation continues to improve," Bloomberg said.
He said Belfast needed to convince the world its peace was permanent. Belfast's so-called "peace lines" — barriers of brick, concrete and barbed-wire fencing that divide much of the city into overwhelmingly Catholic or Protestant zones — must go.
"The fact is, the best and the brightest don't want to live in a city defined by division," Bloomberg said. "They don't want to live behind walls. And they don't want to live in a place where they are judged by their faith or their family name."
Bloomberg is scheduled to travel to London today to meet the British capital's newly elected Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson.
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