"We need immigrants. We need emigrants to return. Anybody who is thinking of coming back, we need you." This was the plea made by President Mary McAleese to a business breakfast for Irish and US executives in Seattle yesterday morning.
Because of the fast growth of the Irish economy, the President said, "more people from the United States are emigrating to Ireland than emigrating from Ireland to the United States, for the first time in our history.
"Ireland is one of the few countries in the EU that said it would immediately take new workers" from the 10 new member states, Mrs McAleese said.
The President is leading a trade mission to the North West of the US which is emphasising the need to attract Irish emigrants back to Ireland, especially in the high tech industries typical of Seattle, to sustain the country's high growth rate.
"We're changing, becoming a multicultural country," she said, noting that there were children in Irish school classes from countries as diverse as Estonia and Nigeria.
"We hope it will make a rich mix for the future, this is an enriching process, not a losing process."
In a speech to students at the University of Washington on Tuesday evening, Mrs McAleese attributed the high growth rate in Ireland to EU membership and US investment.
Ireland was a "basket-case" before joining the EU, she said, but was now a "showcase of the Union's huge potential.
Referring to strains in Europe-US relations over Iraq and other issues, Mrs McAleese said "those who predict the demise of the co-operative and collaberative relationship between Europe and America should look more closely at what binds us together rather than what separates us."
Both were robust and opinionated centres of democratic gravity.
"In democracies based on free speech we expect noise and noise makes news, but we are more than strangers who happen to live side by side, we are family and friends
The Dublin based software firm Arantech, one of 29 companies on the Enterprise Ireland trade mission headed by Mrs McAleese, announced in Seattle that it had secured a $10 million round of financing to expand further into the global market with an office in Boston. Arantech provides management software for mobile phones.
In other agreements, Aircraft Management Technologies of Dublin announced a collaboration with Lean Aerospace Initiative of the US on facilitating airline operations, and Irish company Valista said it was joining IBM to deliver on-demand solutions for telecommunications customers.
Acquis a leading company in spatial data editing announced that a unit of the Michael Baker Corporation had chosen it as a spatial date editor for a maping project in West Virginia.
President McAleese travels to Canada today for a two-day visit to Vancouver.