Pat Shanahan has a drained, exhausted appearance, explained by the fact that he has spent the previous seven hours travelling across several time zones on a return flight from Chicago. He has had to do "the Shannon stopover in reverse", flying into Dublin and getting a connecting flight into Shannon. Then to go into work on a Friday afternoon must take steely nerves.

But the roundabout trip makes him well aware that physical accessibility to the region is crucial as is electronic accessibility. High-speed Internet access for a flat fee is being introduced in Britain and Northern Ireland, putting the Republic at a competitive disadvantage until it follows suit. "The Government can enable the competitiveness of these Internet services by deregulating the industry faster," Mr Shanahan says.

The Chicago trip is one he makes regularly. The PR man explained that Shanahan tackled jet lag by coming straight into work. He is a vice-president of the US-based telecommunications company, Tellabs, and managing director of the Shannon-based facility which employs 500 people, about 150 of whom work in research and development (R&D).

Another 200 work in the Drogheda manufacturing facility. Together the two make up "about 10 per cent of the corporate workforce".

The corporation invests up to 15 per cent per annum in R&D. "Time to market is critical in our business. If we are not first to market, then there are always five or six competitors chomping at the bit."

Tellabs is at the forefront of telephony service development, and has recently signed a deal with Irish Multichannel to use its "cablespan" product as part of the cable company's plans to carry voice, data and video services as an integrated service.

That is "the future", Mr Shanahan says. In the meantime, Tellabs is manufacturing "AN2100GX", which, despite having a name worthy of an Isaac Asimov creation, is a telephone switch. But it is to telephone switches what PCs are to mainframe computers.

"The reason why existing telephone exchanges need to be replaced is they were designed for average call times of three minutes," he says. "The average for Internet access is 35 minutes. It begins to jam these switches.

"It will eventually replace old telephone exchanges because they were designed like old mainframe computers."

All this technology is expected to increase people's leisure time, but he is conscious that many people are working harder than ever. He considers carefully when asked how many hours a day he works. "About 11 hours," he says. But he is "pretty religious" about weekends.

"I am certainly working harder now than I have done in quite some time because I am not only responsible for this facility, but I have also responsibility in three different locations in the US.

"Having said that, I would hope to find more leisure time at an early age than perhaps my father did."

His father was an electrician and his mother ran a pub, Scanlan's, in Castleconnell, Co Limerick, where he grew up. "They were both hardworking and we have a hardworking ethos in our family."

He studied electronic engineering in Cork, one of a minority who chose it over civil engineering. "I was strong in mathematics. I suppose having a father as an electrician, I was much more aware of electricity than building bridges." Emigrating to England after graduation in 1975, he got a job with Marconi as a design engineer and fitted in a stint in India with the company before moving onto Westinghouse.

Returning to the Republic at the age of 30, he got a job with Mitel, was appointed plant manager a year later, in 1984, and then became involved in management buyout negotiations when the company decided to pull out of the Republic.

Shanahan and three others raised €2 million from venture capitalists and merchant bankers in London in equity deals, changed the company's name to Delta Communications and "seriously started doing research and development" in telephony systems and signalling converters. "One of our early products was converting rotary dial exchanges to push button," he says.

Five years later, with the backers looking for a return on their investment and the company seeking more cash to expand, it was bought by the Nasdaq-quoted Tellabs, which was interested in moving into Europe.

He readily admits that innovation is a problem in the Midwest as it seeks to embark on a new phase of industrial development based around software, e-commerce and telecommunications development.

"A lot of commercial activity in the region is production-based manufacturing business but there is not enough research being carried out from an indigenous or multinational point of view. The more innovation, the deeper the roots companies put down in a region."

As chairman of the Regional Innovation Committee, he has highlighted the need to create a network of innovated centres interconnected by broadband telecommunications, forming a basis for industry clusters.

"I have been involved in research and development, and innovation all my life. It was a great opportunity for me to get involved in some regional activity," he says of the role.

He believes the State agencies can do more to promote the finance and support they offer to companies by better use of websites, changing from their traditional role of being a "backer" to being a "broker".

"Smaller companies are just swamped by the amount of grants and support that agencies can offer and probably need to be able to find their way through that myriad of information more easily and the Internet can provide that."

In the workplace, it has provided "a decent restaurant" and a gymnasium. He has used technology to introduce flexitime, working with the Ennis Information Town committee to test how working from home suits employees. "If they want to work at home, we give them portable computers and an 1800 number to dial into our facility."

Although only in the Shannon facility for 18 months, the company is looking at expansion plans. It is diverting into higher end manufacturing, moving up "the food chain", says Mr Shanahan, to become less dependent on cheap labour for a business proposition.

"As a high volume manufacturer in Ireland, if your labour content becomes very high, you become very uncompetitive very fast, particularly against regions like the Far East."

With plants also in Denmark and Finland, the European operations concentrates on the "strong European economies". But is the corporation suffering from the weak euro?

"A lot of our sales are still in dollars," he says. "It offers us some protection on the top line". On the bottom line, European products are positioned less expensively.

"The demand for both data traffic through the Internet and mobile phone usage is driving equipment sales higher and higher every year. That whole infrastructure is changing as well. You had analogue, GSM. You are now going to have WAP [Wireless Application Protocol] phones. Our business is helping that infrastructure growth."