The Brussels bureaucracy is statist, timid and risk averse and is trying to slow down the Irish economy to a pace which makes it feel comfortable, the former speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mr Newt Gingrich, said yesterday.

Commenting on efforts by Brussels to curtail the Government's spending and tax cuts, Mr Gingrich said: "When you look at the facts, Ireland is creating jobs, creating wealth and offering employment for its young people. "You have large redundancies in Italy, France and Germany. It seems to be that the EU and the secretariat in Brussels ought to be looking at how do we get the continental powers to imitate Ireland and not how do we slow Ireland enough to make the other countries comfortable at being inefficient and having high unemployment," he said. Mr Gingrich thought it "bizarre for the European bureaucracy to pick a fight with Ireland when Ireland is the winning model".

He rejected the notion that Ireland was at the centre of a clash between US and European cultures, citing countries such as Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore which employ similar free market policies.

The former speaker and now chief executive of the Gingrich Group, an Atlanta-based management consulting firm, is an ardent admirer of the Irish economic turnaround.

"The powerful things are your commitment to education which I think Americans should study very closely because we have a real crisis in our education system," he said.

"Your tax rates have encouraged companies to invest here, which is very smart. You have really reached out very aggressively to encourage companies and help companies come here and I think things like your new MediaLabEurope are going to continue to see the evolution of Ireland as a growing, dynamic centre of ideas and jobs."

He described the reduction of capital gains tax in Ireland from 40 per cent to 20 per cent as "good an example of supply side economics as you will find elsewhere in the world".

Despite Ireland's success in the past 10 years, Mr Gingrich has urged caution in the current uncertain global economic climate, particularly with the slowdown being experienced in the US.

"It is going to take the US another six months to a year to finish digesting the tummy ache that was caused by the dot.com bubble and the loss of at least a trillion dollars in market capitalisation," he said.

Mr Gingrich described the dot.com bubble burst as the "right thing to happen in the long run", which would lead to much healthier long-term growth.