Business network aims to provide right connections for Irish firms in London

IN A 40-year career in banking, Andy Rogers ended up running Bank of Ireland’s operations in the United Kingdom. Today, he spends much of his time helping Irish business people to make their way in London.

Rogers is now one of the leading lights of the Irish International Business Network (IIBN), a group set up by Conor Foley of Worldspreads two years ago to develop links between the Irish in the city.

There are nearly one million Irish people in Britain, but the community has not matched its strength in numbers with an equivalent strength in business.

“We are seen now as the biggest ethnic group, but we are not identifiable because we have integrated so well. It is a catch 22,” said Rogers, speaking on the margins of an IIBN meeting in London. The group has set up a chapter in New York and arrives in Dublin today to set up a home branch at a meeting in the O’Reilly Hall in the University College Dublin, with 200 already signed up to attend.

Contrasting the success of Irish-Americans in business with the UK experience, Rogers said: “There are different generations here. Some people came in very poor circumstances in the 1950s.

“They built themselves up: the John Murphys, the McNicholases and others, and they are rightly proud of what they have done.

“Then in the 1980s another huge group came and they have formed their own businesses, but they don’t link with the 1950s people, so they are quite separate. There are these disparate groups and then we have those who came in the professional sectors in the last 10 years or so,” he added.

Each six weeks or so, the London chapter meet to hear short presentations from Irish firms that want to do business in the city, lectures from business figures, and take the opportunity to build up contacts.

Cork-born Jonathan Grey, who chairs the organisation, said they hoped the not-for-profit group could become “the first port of call for Irish people if they have a brief or project that they want to give out. If they win the business, that’s great. If not, that’s fine,” said Grey, who runs Ovation Incentives, a firm that offers incentive marketing programmes to firms in the UK and Europe.

"London is a very anonymous place, you are only as good as what you do, not who you say you are or who you are connected to," he told The Irish Times. "It is brutal in that sense. You have to put up. You have to walk the walk as well talk the talk.

“With the economy the way it is, we must find ways of connecting out to the Irish diaspora.”

While the Irish community had been strong in business and later in professional services, he said, it had not “been as good as other immigrant communities in London in connecting with each other”.

“But the connections that the Irish have in construction and engineering are not necessarily the same as they have in the professional services and entrepreneurial world.”