Aida Alvarez may be the first Hispanic woman and Puerto Rican to be a member of the US cabinet and to head the Small Business Administration (SBA), but she got her early education from Irish nuns in Brooklyn and learned "all the Irish songs".
"I had an honorary Irish upbringing," she says, and is now looking forward to her first visit here when she will be bringing along 23 US small companies to discuss "strategic partnerships" with Irish counterparts mainly in the hightech area.
Originally the mission organised with Enterprise Ireland was destined for Dublin only but following contact with the Northern Ireland women attending the "Vital Voices" conference in Uruguay, Ms Alvarez was persuaded to extend her Irish visit to Belfast. She will explore setting up a women's business centre there which can be "matched" with one in the US.
Her own varied career, ending up with a cabinet post at 46, could be an inspiration for many women. When she was a baby, her parents moved from Puerto Rico to New York. While her father struggled as an artist, her mother ran a restaurant and looked after six children.
A scholarship brought Ms Alvarez to Harvard. After graduation, she taught Spanish for two years in Boston and then joined the New York Post where she made a name writing profiles. "I was very good at it," she says without false modesty and often bumps into people "I helped make famous in New York". Then came a high-powered stint as a television journalist with Channel Five Metro Media which brought her an Associated Press award for her reporting on the civil war in El Salvador "from the rebel side".
The day before she headed for the hills with her cameraman to cover the elections, four Dutch journalists on the same story were ambushed and murdered by the "Death Squads". Her reports also got her a nomination for an Emmy Award, but although she was the only nomination in her category, she did not get a prize. "Politics," she says, intervened.
While she does not say so, reporting on the rebels in El Salvador would not have gone down well with those in power during the Reagan years.
She backed Al Gore in his unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988. In 1992, she joined Bill Clinton's campaign before Mr Gore was brought on the ticket. She was asked to serve on Mr Clinton's transition team preparing for the take-over of power and was appointed by the president to head a new regulatory agency, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.
This meant overseeing the country's two biggest housing finance companies forming the core of the trillion-dollar secondary mortgage market. Her experience as an investment banker with Bear Stearn and First Boston after 11 years of journalism obviously helped.
Earlier, she had taken a job in the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation where she had attracted the attention of Bear Stearn who later head-hunted her. It was while serving in the health post that she met her husband, Dr Raymond Baxter.
Their daughter, Aurora, now eight, designed the name sign on her mother's desk saying "Aurora's Mom" and checks on visits to the seventh floor office to see it is still there. Some of Ms Alvarez's father's paintings adorn the walls.
The SBA post was a stepping stone to higher things for her two predecessors. Erskine Bowles went on to become White House chief of staff and Philip Lader is now the US ambassador at the Court of St James's in London.
If Al Gore becomes president in 2000, a call to higher things could await the dynamic Ms Alvarez. Not that heading the SBA is small beer.
The SBA which has been a federal agency since 1953 provides about $11 billion (£7.5 billion) of finance each year to small businesses as well as technical and management assistance. The financial help is mainly in the form of loan guarantees.
While the huge corporations get the headlines, small businesses are the backbone of the US economy. The 23 million small businesses employ more than 50 per cent of the private workforce, generate more than half of the gross domestic product and are the principal source of new jobs in the US economy. Nike and Ben and Jerry ice cream are two once-small-businesses which the SBA helped to grow much bigger.
Now Ireland is seen as a significant gateway for US small businesses seeking to export to the growing EU market, hence next week's mission. Since the White House economic conference of 1985, there has been a US/Ireland Business Partnership Programme.
Enterprise Ireland, with the SBA, has organised four business partnership missions from Ireland to the US which have resulted in more than 100 Irish companies having discussions with over 400 US companies. Almost 50 agreements have been concluded and a further 20 are expected this year.
The nuns at St Patrick's school in Brooklyn would be proud of their former pupil doing the rounds in Ireland to create more jobs and helping women in Northern Ireland to start up their own businesses.
