SOME 81 Irish people are among the 8,000 from 92 countries who work at Disneyland Paris. By the midsummer high season, when temporary employees will have swelled the workforce to 15,000, there will be well over a hundred Irish.
In a recent internal survey of which nationalities best met the criteria for the ideal Disneyland Paris employee - outgoing, friendly, positive, hard working, service orientated, with "team player" ability - the Irish came top, just ahead of the Dutch.
However, not surprisingly, given its location, the nation most represented among Disney's employees at its funpark and hotel extravaganza at Marne La Vallee, east of Paris, are the French. They are followed in order by the British and Irish, the Dutch, the Italians and the Germans.
But you will also find among, the actors, cowboys, waiters, firefighters, salespersons, roundabout operators and half a dozen other "professions" represented in the park, people from as far away as Argentina, Madagascar, Cambodia and Siberia. Very few of the Disneyland Paris staff, despite its generic atmosphere of Thirties America, are from the US.
Irish presence
The Irish presence was probably greatest before Disneyland Paris ever opened, when hundreds of Irish construction workers were involved in building "Main Street USA", "Discoveryland", "Adventure land" and all its other fantasy mini worlds.
"The Irish built Big Thunder Mountain", says Alex Caralis, a Disneyland press officer, referring to the precipitous artificial peak ringed by a scarifying big dipper cum railway which is one of the funpark's most distinctive attractions.
I had lunch recently with three of the young Irish people working in management at Disneyland Paris. Marie Therese Costelloe is 29, from Ennis and working as a guest relations manager. This means, basically, that she has to play her part in ensuring that the 65,000 people who throng through the park's gates every day are kept in a constant state of happiness.
More than 36 million have passed through those gates since Disneyland Paris opened in the spring of 1992. And the company appears to have safely navigated the deep crisis of its first 18 months, which saw it lose over £600 million.
Studied in Shannon
Marie Therese joined Disney a few months before it opened, after studying hotel management at Shannon and in Switzerland. Since joining she has worked in no fewer than six different areas: food and beverages; personnel and training; the park's actual operations; recruitment for a period last year (when she was part of a team handling 75,000 job applications from around the world); a stint with Disney in Florida; and now guest relations.
No wonder she says she could "qualify for any job in the international hotel and leisure market just by having worked for Disneyland".
Fiona Dermody, also 29, is a farmer's daughter from near Tuam, who studied hotel management at Galway, Regional Technical College before moving to work in the Park Lane Hotel in London eight years ago.
She, too, joined Disney just before it opened. She now has an apartment in the smart 8th district of Paris, and loves her job as manager in tele sales, in charge of handling 5,000-9,000 calls from continental Europe every day. She can't conceive of ever living in Ireland again; she says that since coming to Paris she has "never quite lost the feeling of being on holiday".
She says Disney managers are much in demand in the international hotel business. She was recently offered a job in U2's new Clarence Hotel in Dublin.
Gerard Godfrey aged 40 originally from Lucan, Co Dublin, describes himself as a gypsy. After studying geography at Trinity College, he, too, joined the international hotel management trail and spent 12 years with the Intercontinental group in Paris, Cannes and Edinburgh.
He then moved to the Caribbean for three years in a hotel on the island of St Martin; then on to Brussels for two more at the Conrad there; and came home for nine months to help open the Conrad in Dublin.
Biggest hotel
He arrived at Disneyland Paris a year ago to become financial administrator of the largest of the complex's six hotels, the 1,100 bedroom Newport Bay Club, which is the biggest hotel in Europe outside Russia.
He and his French wife - they have three children - were always going to settle down in either France or Ireland, he says. They now live 50 kilometres from Disneyland in a tiny village surrounded by cornfields. Because he drives cross country to work, he avoids all the fearsome Parisan commuter traffic. He gives the impression of a man who is content with his lot.
These young managers are part of the new ambulant, educated Irish, at home in half a dozen countries and quite happy to move on where their career takes them. The US style "can do", melting pot ethos of Disney seems to suit them: perfectly.