Bill O'Shea is not just the president of Bell Laboratories, the famed research organisation which he joined in 1972 and which has just opened a new centre in Blanchardstown; he is also its chief technology officer, or as he puts it himself, someone "who likes taking things apart and seeing how they work".

"As a child I was tinkering about with things and it was a natural progression that I should go on to study electrical engineering," he says.

"Obviously these days a lot of my time is taken up with the management side of things, but the best part of my job is still going down to the floor and seeing what the team are working on - and what the latest ideas are."

Bell Labs is the research and development (R&D) arm of Lucent Technologies, which already employs 500 people in the Republic. The new €43 million research centre (which was officially opened last Monday, on the 129th anniversary of Alexander Graham Bell's application for a patent on the telephone) will employ 40 researchers when fully staffed and was joint-funded by the IDA and Bell Labs.

The opening of the facility comes at a good time for the IDA. Questions had been raised about the agency's future ability to attract multinational investment projects after the European Commission rejected the Government's plan to give State aid to Intel's new wafer fabrication plant in Leixlip two weeks ago.

The commission was concerned that the Government's aid to Intel would not create new jobs or result in an innovative new product. However, R&D projects like that at Blanchardstown are more warmly embraced by the commission. O'Shea doesn't believe it's time to panic just yet.

"Ireland probably doesn't have as much visibility in the States as it might, but there is definitely a perception of a highly educated population that are ready to work with an excellent university system," he says. "I can't really comment on Intel's situation, but we are in close collaboration with them all the time, as we are with the Government, with the universities and with local companies.

"It's that collaboration and understanding that creates such a good climate for research and has made this a fertile start-up, definitely one of the best I've been involved with."

Although this may sound like the business equivalent of Robbie Williams telling the fans that they're the best crowd he's ever played to, O'Shea's words of praise are backed up by the actions of his company, particularly with regard to third-level.

Bell Labs is already involved with several academic exchange programmes between Ireland and the US. Twelve of those are involved with the new Centre For Telecommunications Value-Chain-Driven Research (CTVR) facility based in Trinity, which was set up as part of the same IDA investment that helped fund the new facility.

As well as being an academic centre, the Blanchardstown facility will be the hub of Bell Labs' international business.

The new team there will be working on supply chain technologies to help bring projects from the development stage to the sales end.

They will also spearhead one of its newest projects, which will look at using nanotechnology to cool silicon surfaces - and this venture has clearly grabbed the attention of O'Shea's techie side.

"Nanograss is a piece of silicon with billions of tiny spikes that resembles grass and has some very interesting properties. If you sit a drop of water on top of the spikes it stays there, but if you apply a voltage, the liquid will sink between the spikes," he says.

"At a very basic level, this can be used, for example, with a battery that only needs to be used on occasion, like an emergency flashlight.

"The corrosive acid can sit on top of the spikes for an indefinite period, so that it isn't in contact with the surface, but when the voltage is turned on, it will sink down and the light will come on."

The main potential application of nanograss is to enable denser circuits with higher processing speeds in all kinds of communication devices.

O'Shea is fascinated by technological developments, and is acutely aware of Bell Labs' prestigious history in technological innovation.

As if to remind the staff of that history, the new centre hosts a communications museum with examples of Bell's inventions.

These include one of the first fax machines (not suitable for the desktop), models of the first transistor and some early telephones, and a giant antenna similar to that used to transmit the first transatlantic signals from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

The company's technological track record attracted O'Shea to work at Bell Labs. Born in Peabody, Massachusetts, he studied at Lowell Technological Institute and Northeastern University in Boston before embarking on a career that kept him almost continuously with AT&T - or one of its offshoots - and which neatly followed the path of the telecom giant.

In 1972, AT&T still enjoyed a monopoly on the American telephone network and Bell Labs was its R&D arm. While the parent company was getting involved in a lengthy anti-trust suit filed by the US Department of Justice, O'Shea was working his way up through the sales and marketing divisions before becoming executive director of the IT division in 1985.

The final settlement of the antitrust suit was that AT&T broke up into seven regional companies, or Baby Bells, and in return got the opportunity to go into the computer industry.O'Shea became vice-president of systems marketing and development for the new AT&T Computer Systems in 1988.

However, AT&T's efforts to penetrate the PC market were flagging by 1991 when it acquired National Cash Register (NCR), and O'Shea was the first AT&T executive to move to NCR.

In the mid-nineties there was another split; Bell Labs was spun off into the newly-formed Lucent Technologies and NCR was divested, becoming independent in 1997.

The new slimmed-down AT&T focused on voice and data communications, retaining a small part of the Bell Labs team for its own R&D arm.

It was something of a homecoming for O'Shea when he went to Lucent in 1996, rising to his current position in 2001.

Last Monday was another sort of homecoming, albeit one long delayed. "This is actually my first trip to Ireland, despite my Irish roots," he says.

"I have great hopes for this centre, and I'm looking forward to returning to witness the progress first-hand," he says.