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On December 11, 2025 at the Convention Centre Dublin, the 51st Business & Finance Awards, in association with KPMG, celebrated Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, Loretta Brennan Glucksman, and shone a light on leaders of Ireland’s business community.

The Convention Centre Dublin played host to 1,100 leaders from across the business and political spectrum. Notably, the evening was attended by Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, An Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Loretta Brennan Glucksman, and leaders of Ireland’s business community. Read full highlights from the evening at Highlights of a spectacular 2025 Business & Finance Awards, in association with KPMG Ireland.

As education partners for the Business & Finance Awards, select UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School alumni and scholarship awardees are invited to the annual gala to reconnect with classmates, College leadership and meet business and world leaders. 

Our current Business & Finance Awards Scholar, Rory O’Sullivan, reflected on the night. 

Last night, Hillary Rodham Clinton was called forward and given the Sutherland Leadership Award. Such occasions usually speak in the language of completion. Yet her acceptance speech resisted that closure. She quoted Eavan Boland, the Irish poet who understood that history is not an archive, but a collection of meaning that gathers, slowly and unevenly, around what has already happened.

To watch Clinton’s career is to see a life shaped less by arrival than by persistence. Trained as a lawyer, formed by civil rights struggles, attentive to children whose disabilities placed them at the margins, she has spoken for women not as symbols but as lives lived under constraint.

These roles do not line up as a ladder. They overlap, interrupt one another, and sometimes contradict. This is how real work in history is done.

From an Irish vantage point, one moment gathers particular weight. During the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement, Clinton’s work as First Lady was not ceremonial. It was connective. She listened, insisted, and returned. Peace in Northern Ireland did not come from a single signature but from a willingness to remain present.

The Agreement altered the direction of Ireland’s future. It reshaped the relationship between Ireland and the United States, turning into sustained engagement. Investment followed, as did movement: of capital, of talent, of expectation. The growth now spoken of in economic terms—figures, percentages, even a single month yielding ten billion dollars in corporate tax—rests on a prior condition. Stability. The absence of fear. The chance to imagine tomorrow without rehearsing yesterday’s injuries.

Boland knew that history is never finished with us. It continues to gather meaning in the present tense. In that sense, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s legacy is not fixed to a podium or an award. It lives in the ongoing relationship between Ireland and America and in the quiet understanding that what was once fragile has, through care and attention, been allowed to prosper.

For five years, Business & Finance Awards have partnered with UCD Smurfit School to award a high-calibre applicant who will represent the world’s next generation of business leaders. This unparalleled scholarship provides the student with a unique experience which encompasses opportunities to engage and network with senior business leaders; and to receive mentoring outside the classroom, which will the bridge the gap between academia and the business world. Learn more about the 2026 Scholarship.