‘In Singapore you become 110% Irish’

When Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore, in 1819, he turned to George Drumgoole Coleman, an architect from Drogheda, to provide him with the courthouses, civic residences, roads and churches that the East India Company required to establish a great outpost of commerce in the southeast Asian nation.

With masterpieces such as the first Anglican church in Singapore, St Andrew’s Cathedral, in 1835, and the Armenian Church of St Gregory the Illuminator, on Hill Street, Coleman left a stamp on this city state, now home to 5.4 million people, establishing a physical framework on which Singapore has thrived.

About 3,000 Irish people live in Singapore, and like their predecessors they make a deep impression on the tropical city, where it’s always warm but where it also seems to rain every day, right around 3pm.

Colin MacDonald is the latest Irishman to leave an architectural imprint on the city, with the opening of a Premier Inn hotel on Beach Road. From Mount Merrion, in south Dublin, the property developer was a banker before setting up an Irish pub, Father Flanagan’s, in 1997. The side business quickly became the day job, and he went to work for Singapore’s largest private property developer, the Far East Organisation, owned by the Ng family. Among the projects he worked on was converting the colonial post office into the high-end Fullerton Hotel.

“Since I first arrived in Singapore, 27 years ago, I have been fortunate to have had the experience of working around the region with a large multinational, HSBC, and in Singapore with the Far East Organisation,” says MacDonald, speaking in the bar of the Grand Hyatt hotel, which is packed with a Friday-evening after-work crowd. Singapore’s diversity is on show here, with Chinese, Indian, Malay and westerners mixing in the upscale lounge.

“Singapore is a great environment in which to establish an entrepreneurial venture, with a proactive, can-do culture and an excellent, predictable legal framework,” says MacDonald, whose wife, Gillian, is Singaporean. They have three teenage children.

“Like Ireland, Singapore is a small country . . . Both countries have young, well-educated, English-speaking populations, and many of the businesses which locate themselves in Singapore are also present in Ireland,” he says.

“The young Irish people who have arrived in recent years have shown themselves to be well able to adapt culturally and have settled in well. It is very encouraging to see the manner in which Irish people distinguish themselves by their willingness to learn about the local culture and integrate into Singaporean society.”

A former president of the Irish Chamber of Commerce, MacDonald is also president of the Singapore Ireland Fund, which builds ties between Ireland and Singapore by donating to philanthropic causes in education, the arts, community and sport.

Irish educator

It is not just the physical infrastructure that Ireland has played a role in building in Singapore. When you mention that you are Irish conversations quickly turn to Br John Joseph McNally, from Ballintubber, in Co Mayo, who died in 2002 after spending 37 years teaching in Singapore and Malaysia. A sculptor and artist, he was the founder and president emeritus of the La Salle-SIA College of the Arts.

“It’s hard to think of a more significant influence on arts education in Singapore – a visionary educator, promoter of the arts, man of the world and deeply intuitive artist. Br Joe’s influence is tangible across generations of artists, gallerists and collectors,” says Barbra Gan, vice-president of strategic development at the college, which sits on a street named after McNally.

“His art incorporates organic, often figurative forms. They were strongly symbolic, and displayed humanist themes. Br Joe had special skills in working with wood,” Gan adds. “He used the wood’s natural grain and lustre to create reflective, glossy finishes and to enhance and deepen its natural colour. Here in Singapore he was likely to be aware of Chinese traditions of wood carving, as well as collections of philosophers’ stones and scholars’ rocks.”

McNally pushed his vision of arts education for the wider community during the 1980s, a time of economic pragmatism. Everywhere you go you meet past pupils glad that he did this; there is solid loyalty to McNally in Singapore. “One can imagine how truly unconventional he must have been to achieve so much for the arts during those years,” Gan sys.

“Asia-lite”

Paraic McGrath, development director of the Irish building materials company CRH in southeast Asia, has been in Singapore since 2003. He is also vice-chairman of the GAA’s Asian county board.

“Singapore makes it quite easy to come out and visit Asia. It is known as ‘Asia-lite’. It can be quite a daunting task to go to Changchun, in China, or the Kansai region, in Japan, or northern Thailand as your first port of call, looking for work and looking for experience. Singapore makes that easy,” says McGrath, who is from Claremorris, in Co Mayo.

“Going into uncharted waters where rules can change every day, it’s very hard to do business. Here it’s not going to happen that way. It provides a good structure and rules and regulations, and they also recognise that, after 50 years in existence, it is time to move on to the next stage. They need to be more open; they need to allow more foreigners to come in with the innovation and ideas and experience that they have learned from other markets. Singapore is very smart in realising that’s the way forward for them.

“Irish people tend to become 110 per cent Irish when they come out to Asia. Very proud of their country, very proud of what we are – storytellers, talkers and communicators.”

McGrath loves to talk about the GAA, which has 300 members here and has been boosted by the large number of physiotherapists who have come to work in the country.

Singapore’s diversity is appealing, with Chinese, Malay and Indian all getting on in a region where this is not always the case. With English as the official language, it is an easy city to get by. Stroll through Little India or Chinatown and you can see how these cultures coexist and thrive.

In the calm of the Conrad Centennial hotel its general manager, a Limerick man named Mark Meaney, is talking about the city state’s strong appeal to the Irish.

“The climate here is wonderful, an equatorial humid climate averaging 30 degrees year round; it’s like summer every day. It is great for living an outdoor lifestyle. We eat outside all the time and spend a lot of time at the pool with the kids. It does get a bit like Groundhog Day, as it rarely changes, but a couple of weeks in a cold climate and you really miss the weather here,” he says.

Meaney found it easy to adjust to Singapore when he moved here from Tokyo, two years ago. The Japanese city is widely regarded as the culinary capital of the world, but Meaney really enjoys the food in his new home, too.

“If you like food Singapore is amazing. There is such a wide array of food available, from the local street-food specialities in the hawker centres to world-class dining,” he says, adding that its status as a food destination has been cemented by the publication, over the summer, of the first Michelin guide to Singapore.

“I could live here,” says Laurene Buckley, a 19-year-old from Cork who is studying commerce at University College Dublin. She has visited Singapore before, and has also been to China, Indonesia and Malaysia, as her father, Peter, holds a senior post at CRH. “There’s a lot to do here in comparison with Ireland,” she says. “It’s great for going out. I didn’t know much about Singapore before I came out. I knew it was very business-oriented, but I didn’t know much beyond that. Ireland’s quite energetic too, but it’s different here.”

FROM CASTLEBAR TO CURE: SINGAPORE’S HIT IRISH CHEF

Singapore has become a food haven over the past five years, offering everything from delicious street food, which you buy from hawker stands, to sophisticated Indian cuisine and European-style fine dining – something that Michelin recognised this summer with the launch of its first guide to where to eat here. Chefs have arrived from all over the world, and there are now more than 6,500 places to eat in Singapore, of which about 2,500 are sit-down restaurants. That makes it a tough environment in which to make your mark.

One man who has managed it is Andrew Walsh, a Co Mayo chef who is a founder and owner of one of Singapore’s top restaurants, Cure. “Eating out is the number-one pastime here,” he says. “People here are very educated in high cuisine and western-style cuisine, and they are looking for a new experience. Singapore is not cheap, so people want a new experience, but they also want value for money. Produce is never cheap.”

The ‘Straits Times’ recently praised Walsh’s creativity – “The way flavours and textures play variously with one another in each dish means you never get bored with it. Yet nothing feels forced or gimmicky” – and the influential Asian food blog Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow named Cure its 2015 restaurant of the year, declaring that it was in love with the Breaghwy man.

Among his hits are foie gras brûlée, beef and smoked bone marrow tartare, and grilled Iberico pork loin with smoked mussels and smoked mackerel, as well as the more Asian-inflected crab salad and basil sorbet.

Cure is tapping into the Singapore vogue for casual fine dining, with its open kitchen and bare tables, which seat 40 people.

It is the latest stop on a long journey around the world for Walsh. Born into a family of eight children, he went to Davitt College in Castlebar before becoming a kitchen porter at the TF Royal Hotel , where he was taken in by his chef brother, Lyndon. Then he enrolled at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology and was sent by his teacher Ida Jennings to what is now Tom Crean Fish & Wine, in Kenmare, followed by a stint with Kevin Thornton in Dublin.

After a year cooking around Australia he moved to New York, to work at Brad Farmerie’s Public restaurant. “I loved New York, but I heard of this great Irish chef in London, at Lindsay House in Soho, so off I went, knocking on Richard Corrigan’s door. I started there before moving to my great friend and mentor Tom Aikens, at his Michelin-starred restaurant of the same name. His was the hardest kitchen in London at the time,” Walsh says.

He worked as sous-chef at Jason Atherton’s Michelin-starred Pollen Street Social, shortly after Atherton split from Gordon Ramsay. It was Atherton who dispatched Walsh to set up his first Singaporean venture, the Spanish-influenced Esquina, in the hip Keong Saik neighbourhood.

Walsh worked with Atherton’s business partner Loh Lik Peng, a major figure in Asian restaurant circles. “Peng was actually born in Ireland, as his parents trained there to become doctors, so I guess we can claim him,” Walsh says. Wherever the Irish go, he adds, “we try to do well. It’s like we have something to prove and are very keen to make something of ourselves. And I’m doing that in Singapore.”

This report was supported by the Global Irish Media Fund