For Ireland, the headlines over the past three years may have screaming about crashing property prices and floundering domestic banks, but beneath the country’s genuine economic difficulties one of its biggest success stories, international financial services, has survived the financial crisis and economic downturn in good shape. Now, for the fund services sector in particular, the pendulum seems to be swinging back from threat to opportunity.

True, the industry has had to grapple with the sharp fall in capital markets in 2008 that depressed the level of fund assets and in consequence the fee income of service providers, but hedge fund managers made up much of their performance losses the following year. Investor capital, so skittish in the weeks and months following the crash of Lehman Brother and the uncovering of Bernard Madoff’s multi-billion-dollar fraud, has been coming back over the past 12 months, at first at a trickle, later in more substantial flows.

It might still be too early to declare the crisis successfully weathered, but fund industry professionals in Ireland are already identifying trends that they believe will reinforce the country’s position as the world’s leading service centre for alternative funds – most importantly the impetus for improved fund regulation and governance that already is strengthening its position as a fund domicile within the European Union.