A first visit to Texas is daunting. It is eight times the size of Ireland, no less. Houston and its "consolidated metropolitan area" alone is the size of Ireland. Even that distinguished man of letters, Sean O Faolain, found Texas hard to grapple with when writing about it 30-odd years ago.
"What does the average traveller expect of Texas?" he asked. "Not much in the way of joys and pleasures, if I may judge by the slightly astonished headline I once achieved in a Waco newspaper. It said `Irishman here for pleasure'."
This Irishman has not yet made any headlines in the Houston newspapers after three days but if its pleasure you are after, this city with its once "redneck, oiltown" image is teeming with theatres (only Broadway has more seats), museums, restaurants (8,100), a famous medical centre and much evidence of gracious living in the wooded suburbs.
Its most famous resident is now George Bush who has had the international airport called after him. George Bush Jnr, the popular governor of Texas, is widely tipped as the Republican candidate for the presidential election in 2000.
Another former president, Lyndon B. Johnson, began his teaching career in Houston in 1930 before he went into politics and ended up in the Oval Office when John K. Kennedy died in Dallas. Kennedy spent his last night in Houston.
The city is called after Gen Sam Houston, said to have Scotch-Irish blood, who achieved fame by defeating the Mexican general, Santa Anna, in nearby San Jacinto. Houston became the first president of the Republic of Texas until 1846 when it joined the Union.
Earlier this year a group of Texans from the mountains to the east, tried to revive Houston's "independent republic" claiming it had never been legally incorporated into the United States. A bloody shoot-out ensued and that was the end of the independent republic.
The oil strike at Spindletop in 1901 put Houston on the map and made it the centre of the spin-off industries. Although it is more than 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, the enterprising city wangled government funds to build a ship canal and Houston is today the second biggest port in the US.
As an oil town Houston had a tough image in the rest of the US but with its growing wealth it worked hard to get rid of it - even if John Travolta in Urban Cowboy in 1980 helped to brand Houston as "redneck heaven".
This week it was hard to see Houston in such crude terms as I sat in the City Hall and listened to Elyse Lanier, wife of the mayor, speak about its attractions. This is her role as chairman of the Houston Image Group.
Then it was the turn of the mayor himself, Bob Lanier, to tell how Houston has the "safest downtown area in the country". In the 1980s, when there was high unemployment and a crime wave as world oil prices collapsed, Lanier put hundreds of extra police on the streets of Houston and expanded prison space. Today if a pothole appears in the city streets it is repaired within 48 hours and the same goes for grafitti. The mayor's term is up later this year after six years. He is strongly tipped as the next US ambassador to Mexico following the rejection last week of President Clinton's first choice, William Weld, by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Jesse Helms.
The collapse of the oil price in the 1980s, from over $40 to $10 at one stage, was disastrous for Houston with its huge dependence on the industry. More than 200,000 jobs were lost. Houston became in the words of the Wall Street Journal "widely reviled as an abject example of an overbuilt, busted oiltown whose decline, liberal journalist, James Fallows, pointedly noted was `deeply gratifying to many people'."
But today, the newspaper reported recently, "cities both east and west would do well to learn from Houston how to rebuild a shattered economy". There is civic pride in how the city recovered all the lost jobs, cut unemployment to 5 per cent and attracted a new entrepreneurial class with no interest in oil.
Low taxes, no zoning and a burgeoning ethnic population mix of whites, African-Americans and Hispanics have helped create the new wealth. Computer and software firms, such as Compaq and BMC, observe for what it's worth that they are not obliged to deal with labour unions.
Irish immigrants were part of the earlier oil boom and a geologist called Patillo Higgins, helped by George O'Brien and George Carroll, persevered with "dry holes" until Spindletop gushed in 1901. Today, 15 per cent of greater Houston's 4.2 million residents claim Irish ancestry.
There were Irish at the Alamo, in the Texas Rangers fighting the Mexicans, in the Texas militias in the Civil War and in the army of workers building the railroads across the huge state in the 19th century. There are small towns along the tracks still called after them.
Unlike Sean O Faolain they did not come to Texas "for pleasure" but they have left their mark.