A few years ago I had to explain that my consultancy business was named "after the river that flows through Dublin". Blank stares. Vague nodding. Is that Dublin, California? Now I tell people that the business is named "after the river in Riverdance" and I get instant smiles of recognition. Those tap-happy ambassadors are now as much part of the US vernacular as baseball, hot dogs and Chevrolet. There's even a Heineken radio advert where the young lager-lout has discovered he can attach used beer cans to his feet to make him sound "like those Irish dancers on the TV".
It's cool to be Irish in the US now. The brothers McCourt are all over the place. The Tony Awards ceremony in New York last month was like a work's outing for the Druid Theatre Company. Riverdance and the Guinness Fleadh have been touring the US, each with a recent appearance in the Bay Area.
Interestingly, the fleadh was promoted as an Irish music festival, but one of the unlikely stars was England's own Billy Bragg and another was blues master and Bay Area resident, John Lee Hooker. The fleadh audience was still predominantly Irish, but there was more than a smattering of the Bay Area's renowned ethnic mix in evidence.
Given this cultural vogue, what's in it for Irish business? Can it capitalise on the warm and increasingly well-informed feelings it encounters in Corporate America? Maybe I got my answer when only one of the several Irish companies based in the Bay Area responded to my request for comment on this subject. The prevailing opinion is summed up by Larry Mone, the local emissary for the Enterprise Ireland development agency. According to Mr Mone: "Being Irish doesn't help get the business, but it can certainly help keep it."
Colin Newman, executive vice-president of marketing at IONA Technologies, agrees that his company never plays "the Irish card".
"From the beginning we saw ourselves as a global software company," he said. "We even had an American flavour, with an 800-number and a US address." Sure enough, its Website says: "IONA is based in Cambridge, MA; San Francisco, CA; Perth, Australia; Frankfurt, Germany; London, UK; Hong Kong and Dublin, Ireland."
The company's first US office was in Silicon Valley, to keep tabs on a partnership with Sun Microsystems. Subsequently, it has set up US headquarters on the other coast, outside Boston.
"US customers expect us to have a strong American presence, with technical support relatively close by," adds Mr Newman. "That said, US corporations seem to quite like dealing with Irish people in business our early salespeople were all Irish, and they were very successful in the US."
An intangible benefit of being an Irish company is that it offers another dimension to jaded analysts and meeting attendees when conference season rolls around. IONA is a member of an 800-company strong computer industry association known as OMG. This group has quarterly meetings at the premises of one its member companies, and Mr Newman notes that the meetings IONA hosts in Ireland are always the best-attended.
Another Irish company with a strong US business, and a US stock exchange listing, regularly takes industry analysts to visit its development facility outside Dublin.
So does being Irish confer any advantage when doing business in Silicon Valley? Turns out that it does, because the Irish network, though splintered, is very powerful. Take the St Joseph's GAA club, founded in 1995 to mark San Jose's twinning with Dublin.
Like any valley start up, the club has a Website.* It has also experienced valley-style growth rates, and now embraces football, hurling and women's football. Incredibly, this rich picking ground for motivated, educated Irish technologists has no significant corporate sponsor yet.
Derry Murphy, an engineer at Dolch Computer Systems, says that club members are very aware of their networking power and will always help a new Bay Area arrival find their feet and "point them in the right direction" for jobs, accommodation and business contacts. There's a constant turnover in the club, according to its manager, Mel McIntyre. That's probably because these days many Irish engineers are returning to Ireland and taking their little black books of US contacts home with them. It's slightly ironic that the same US companies that benefited from Irish-educated engineers in the 1970s and 1980s are now giving Irish entrepreneurs the knowledge they need to go back to Ireland and set up their own businesses, which will flourish by assuming an American identity. Isn't free enterprise a wonderful thing?
Frank O'Mahony can be contacted at frank@liffey.com
* www.geocities.com/colosseum/arena/2338
