Out of six billion people on the planet, one billion controlled more than 80 per cent of all assets and three billion lived on less than $2 a day, the President of the World Bank told the Institute of European Affairs yesterday.

Mr James Wolfensohn, originally from Australia, was in Dublin on a one-day visit. He held talks with the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, and the Minister of State for Development, Mr Tom Kitt on ways to strengthen links with Ireland's development co-operation programme, particularly in Africa.

Addressing the IEA on the topic, "Towards a More Secure World", Mr Wolfensohn said that in the next 25 years the world's population would grow to eight billion, seven billion of whom would live in developing countries.

"Certainly on September 11th anyone that thought there was a wall around developed countries must have recognised that that wall does not exist. To me the image of the World Trade Centre collapsing was an image of an imaginary wall collapsing."

Poverty was not just a moral, ethical or social issue but needed to be looked at within the context of "a new globalised, interdependent world" in which a terrorist attack in Bali was felt in Dublin, or an attack in New York was felt in Frankfurt. He said: "If you are trying to redress a balance in economic terms you really need growth to allow you to change patterns of development and certainly distribution of resources.

There are many concerns on the world political scene: "Most notable, of course, at this moment \ the question of whether there will or will not be war in Iraq and, if there is, what is going to happen, not just in Iraq, but everywhere else?"

Creating a more stable world required greater equity: "We need to look at the question of poverty, if there is to be stability and peace," Mr Wolfensohn said.