An Irishman's Diary

It probably wasn't a factor in persuading Google to set up here. But it seems to me apt that a country with such inadequate signposting as ours should house the European headquarters of the world's leading search engine. It would be even more apt if the company's offices were in west Clare, which in my experience is full of road junctions where the number of directional signposts is fewer than the number of directions.

Perhaps the missing finger-post is in an Irish pub in New York, showing lonely emigrants the way home. But this is never any consolation when you're lost and you arrive at yet another crossroads with only three signs, none of them saying "Ennis".

It's like being trapped in a surreal TV game show. You can choose the mystery road, which might just take you to your desired destination. Or you can quit now with what you have already, and head for the nearest pub (and look up your position on Google Earth).

Anyway, as I say, that probably wasn't the inspiration behind the company's locating here, or its decision to create 500 more jobs in Dublin. The inspiration - at least if you believe the Government propaganda - was a highly educated Irish workforce that matches Google's genius for innovation. In a US advertising campaign earlier this year, aimed at potential investors, the IDA put it like this: "The Irish mind. An abundant supply of that rare commodity you'll need to bring your business to peak performance. The Irish. Creative. Imaginative. And Flexible. Agile minds with a unique capacity to initiate and innovate without being directed. Always thinking on their feet. Adapting and improving. Generating new knowledge and new ideas. Working together to find new ways of getting things done. Better and faster." Note the phrase "without being directed"! And yet the campaign was about more than our ability to find our way out of west Clare without the help of signposts. Its keynote image was the Louis Le Brocquy painting of Bono's head: the artists's attempt - in the IDA's words - "to make a recognisable image of Bono's outward appearance while attempting to portray. . . the wavelengths of his inner dynamism".

The U2 singer was an inspired choice to represent the Irish mind. A few months after the full-page ads appeared in the Wall Street Journal, his band moved most of its business from Ireland to Holland: a dramatic display of the mental agility and innovativeness on which we as a nation pride ourselves. Sure, the move was a little controversial in some quarters. But the readers of the WSJ would have loved it.

Meanwhile, even without U2, the coffers of the Minister for Finance continue to bulge. Yesterday's Estimates were an even more eloquent testimony than the IDA ad to the fact that Ireland is an old hand at one of the world's newer industries: nation branding.

If you don't believe in such a concept, you probably didn't attend last weekend's conference on the subject in London, although representatives of 65 countries did. The experts in the field are well used to outrage from people who accuse them of treating countries like "products in a global supermarket". This only encourages them.

To paraphrase their argument, nation branding is what helps you decide which of two identical products to buy when one of them is labeled "made in Germany" and the other - to take a topical example - "made in Kazakhstan". It's not just about advertising, they say. First there has to be some substance in the image you're projecting. Then you have to get the message out, which is where Bono's inner wavelengths come in.

Sometimes, happy accidents play a part. Home And Away might be closer to the suburbanised reality of most Australians' lives, but the global success of Crocodile Dundee a generation ago enshrined their image as a nation of honest, earthy, fun-loving frontiersmen, who would sooner wrestle crocodiles than use a bidet.

And sometimes, unhappy accidents play a part too. Just ask the aforementioned Kazakhstan, unwitting star of the Borat movie, a surprise hit on both sides of the Atlantic. The film has certainly put the central Asian republic on the map; and an optimistic interpretation of this development would be that, whereas the country used to have no public image at all, now it has something to work with.

The alternative view is that Kazahkstan been hit by an unnatural disaster and needs humanitarian aid. Unfortunately, when it asked the world's leading nation brander for help, he declined to take on the case. He doesn't like the product, apparently.

The Kazakhs are not the only ones offended by Borat. The hero's "home" village portrayed in the film is actually Romanian, and the impoverished villagers who were paid to take part in what they thought was an obscure foreign production are now angry at finding themselves the butt (or the sub-butt) of a worldwide joke.

You win some, you lose some. Romania is another country that used to have no brand image: good or bad. Now it is famous as the home of Count Dracula, with a modest tourism industry to boot. Yet Romania's relationship with Dracula is almost entirely the work of a man who was born in Clontarf and never visited Transylvania. He just had a particularly fevered version of that IDA-promoted concept, the Irish mind.