Skulking around the Pacific seabed on board a US submarine bristling with nuclear missiles in the early 1970s is not everybody's idea of doing military service, but Dave Young says that as a young man it was a good alternative to creeping around the Vietnamese jungle.

Now 51, he is operations manager at Hewlett-Packard's European inkjet cartridge manufacturing plant at Leixlip, Co Kildare, which is being officially opened today. He arrived here three years ago to oversee the evolvement of the company's cutting edge print technology. Although the popular view of an inkjet cartridge might be of something akin to a typewriter ribbon, it is a technology which is challenging the laser printer by providing a cheap, effective alternative.

"It is actually technically very, very sophisticated, very difficult to build, very leading-edge design and materials," he says.

He points to a glistening poster showing a red Ferrari sports car in all its glory. It has been printed on the HP DesignJet 2500 CP and illustrates the emerging image processing capabilities of inkjet printers. The company is committed to technological innovation. "We actually take pride in being able to make obsolete our own products."

Soon, he says, you will take a photograph with your digital camera, call up the image on your PC and download it to your relatives, all within half an hour. "It does colour much more easier. That is the real key. Colour with the laser is very expensive, colour with the inkjet is just a different colour ink," he says. Mr Young admits that the laser printer, which Hewlett-Packard also manufactures, "tends to be a little bit faster at this point".

"The print quality is about equal. Lasers have speed and inkjet has colour, and those are the market differentials at the moment," he says. The opening of phase two of the Liffey Park plant marks an extension of the manufacturing process of the cartridge, and involves the building of the electronic part of the print head, incorporating a silicon chip, which connects to the printer.

Mr Young says: "Of the inkjet printers, we have over 50 per cent of the market share.

"Most products that you would find in the world, the major producer would have 20 to 30 per cent. So we are very leading edge," he says.

Originally trained as a mechanical engineer, he digressed into nuclear engineering while with the US navy, and was an operations officer aboard the USS James Monroe which was "a mixture of extreme boredom and times when you had to be very quiet". "There were times when it got pretty scary, it got pretty tense. There was constant danger that we were being followed by the Soviet Union. . . There was a lot more going on than people know," he says. After spending seven years with Westinghouse Hanford Co as a nuclear engineer working on a liquid metal fast breeder reactor test facility, he moved to Hewlett-Packard, reverting to his mechanical engineer background.

He has worked as a quality engineer, quality manager, production manager and materials manager "always manufacturing", he says.

Two months ago, following a profit warning, the company reported a 13 per cent drop in second-quarter net profits, down to $685 million to the end of April from $784 million in 1997. But the Leixlip plant is on target to recruit its full quota of 3,000 employees by 2001, the management has said, and currently has 1,450.

Mr Young says that the Asia crisis is watched all the time and there is constant forecasting of the marketplace. "It has slowed down, there is no doubt that it has slowed down from what we were thinking a year ago. But it is still a rapidly growing business."

He points out that the Irish plant has a certain amount of buttressing from the global computer industry's vagaries because it is a "supplies business".

"Hewlett-Packard has sold some 50 or 60 million printers. Fifty or 60 million people are going to get cartridges for them. They have already bought our product and they are going to buy our cartridges," he says.

He adds that as a European manufacturing base, it is an important psychological location. Proximity to Hewlett-Packard's markets was "the first decision we made when we were looking for the site".

"Part of it is just having a presence in the market place that you are selling into. It is being here.

"We are actually here, we have invested here, we are using European labour and, as Europeans, we are listening to the European customer," he says.

Having arrived here three years ago, he has enjoyed the Irish experience saying the education system is "top rung".

"If you hire good people and threat them reasonably, they do the job. I think I knew that before but I saw it dramatically here.

"It seems to be not something that is cultural. People are willing to do a good job and really make things happen if you just choose them correctly and treat them correctly," he says.