When Mr Michael Fagan, the head of the domain registry for Ireland, was interviewed for the job, he was told by outgoing director Dr Denis Jennings, "there's one thing I promise - this isn't going to be a bed of roses."

And it certainly isn't. As Mr Fagan acknowledges: "I reckon I became one of the most hated people in Ireland. But in some ways that was good - up til then, people were dealing with a faceless department at UCD."

The domain registry is the all-important body that decides who gets which Internet domain name under the .ie suffix - www.irish-times.ie, for example.

Until recently, when it was spun off as an independent entity in accordance with international plans to privatise domain administration, the registry was operated by University College Dublin, where it is still physically based.

While decisions over domain names might seem - well, academic - they can spell success or failure for companies wishing to have an online presence.

In addition, the Internet's massive expansion in recent years has opened many political cans of worms, not to mention legal cases over domain name assignation. Top that off with the fact that the domain registry is of particular interest to a range of adept techies - devotees of the minutiae of domain operation, who can be passionate about how the Internet is run - and Mr Fagan was walking into a wall of flame.

A self-described "bean counter" he started as an article clerk on £1 a week for controversial accountant Mr Russell Murphy, accountant to such luminaries as Gay Byrne and Hugh Leonard. Mr Murphy misappropriated thousands of pounds belonging to the celebrities.

Born in Windsor in England of Irish parents - his father worked for the Rank Organisation in Britain - Mr Fagan was sent off to an English boarding school where he acquired a "toffee-nosed accent". When his parents eventually returned to Ireland and sent him off to the Christian Brothers-run Colaiste Mhuire on Parnell Square in Dublin, he says he was "the number one target for all".

His memories aren't fond. "The way they motivated you to learn was pure terror. But they got results," he concedes. A high or low point for him, depending on how you look at it, came after prayers one morning for the canonisation of Patrick Pearse, a daily ritual. Mr Fagan pointed out to a brother that Pearse could hardly be canonised since he was a Protestant.

"They absolutely beat me about the classroom. This was heresy," he says with some relish.

Thus, he says he was happy enough when he finished school and his parents paid £50 for him to be bound over to Mr Murphy, "who owned me body and soul for five years". Mr Murphy was the leading figure doing receiverships and liquidations at the time, so that became Mr Fagan's specialty as well. He describes Mr Murphy as "a wonderful character, outside the aberration at the end of his life".

After his clerkship, he worked for several companies, among them Warner Lambert and BP. At BP, he was secretary of BP nutrition working with animal feeds. He points out that BP used reclaimed crisps from crisp factories to create mink feed. "Up to 85 per cent of crisps are fat. We sold the feed to Ireland and those Irish mink were getting awards in Finland for their pelts," he says. While at BP, he first came into contact with computers, the company's big mainframes.

He had become European financial controller for BP by then. "I thought, computers were definitely here to stay and I'd better get to know them or I'd become a dinosaur."

He could also see that accountancy only allowed an employee to climb so far up the corporate ladder before hitting a pay ceiling, "while technical people had no ceiling".

He went to work as the financial controller in the Republic for a US technology company called Storage Technology from Boulder, Colorado, and was eventually sent to Boulder to work for many years.

There, he was more or less "just dumped in" and learned about computers from the ground up. The company did very well, then began to have problems when it tried to change directions into a new area of technology. "The dream never materialised," he says. "We filed under Chapter 11 (bankruptcy protection in the US, which shields a company from its creditors). It's a very civilised way of doing things, I think. We should have the equivalent of Chapter 11 here."

Speaking from experience, he says the process here of sending in liquidators is brutal and doesn't allow a company to restructure and rebuild, as with Chapter 11 protection in the US. "Once [the liquidators] go in, it's over.

"It was particularly grim with a family business. You'd say, I want your keys to the premises and the company car," he recalls.

"I think there's a fantastic difference between American and European culture. A guy who tries to make it in several businesses and failed is considered a good employee and admired for trying and finding out what not to do."

Eventually, Mr Fagan returned to Ireland but "didn't like the tax regime" after the US levels of tax, and went to work on the Isle of Man. "The tax is 25 per cent maximum, and if you plan, 15 per cent. It was very beautiful etcetera, but very restrictive. Unless you could afford to fly to Europe every weekend it was very claustrophobic."

Then the economy started to improve in the Republic, so he returned to work as a consultant - "always within the computer industry". Before long, "I was told UCD was looking for a financial controller to come in and run the domain registry with the aim to spin it off in three to four months." Mr Fagan liked the prospect of the job, he says, because it was short and defined, would draw on his financial background, was related to high technology and was a grassroots project.

"It was everything I wanted - but that was on paper," he grins. Once he got in, the atmosphere toughened. "What I realised the Internet community was looking for was someone human they could beat up on because we were running a very tightly controlled, restrictive registry." At the time, it took up to six to eight weeks to get an .ie address and a company couldn't use the domain until the paperwork was completed and the domain formally awarded.

That has now changed, but many complain the registry is still too tightly run.

Much of the anger and argument vented at Mr Fagan comes from a group that defines itself as "the Internet community", he says. The community are "very technically-minded people who felt they were [involved with the Internet] from the beginning", he says.

"But the reality is that for anyone now to think of the community as a few technically-minded individuals is a falsehood. It's really the whole country. Now, we're not talking of the community as a small clique of techies. Everyone, we feel, is the Internet community."

Despite the challenges, Mr Fagan says he loves his job. "This business is more that fun, it's addictive. Why? I don't know. I think because some of us feel we're in something that's going to be so big in the future," he says.

"It's not the money - nothing financial could repay you," he laughs. "And another advantage - there's incredible job security because no one else would want it."