Tim O'Toole, the new boss of the London Tube, or Toob as he puts it in his Philadelphian brogue, has been touring Ireland and soon found that it wasn't such a long way from the American east coast after all.
"We stopped in a tiny village in Kerry to get a soda. And there were these three little boys speaking Gaelic. One young fella said, 'are you American, and where are you from.' I said Philadelphia. A big smile came on his face and he said 'Alan Iverson.' He's a bebop basketball player. It was a frightening level of global cultural hegemony."
More and more companies are run by overseas managers and London Mayor Ken Livingstone has scoured the world for top-notch managers to tackle London's transport crisis.
He recruited O'Toole when he finally won control last year of the London underground.
Before crossing the pond, O'Toole was a proven business leader who led a multi-billion dollar railroad company which had what he calls a "spectacular turnaround" in its fortunes.
He is also "100% Irish going all the way back. Four families: Higgins, O'Toole, Corbett and Curran. All seem to be from the west of Ireland. Some of the O'Tooles seem to be from Wicklow but most seem to be from the Galway and Mayo. A couple of years ago we went there for a family vacation and found the little farmhouse my one grandfather was from in Clonbur near the border with Mayo. On my mother's side, my grandfather and his four brothers, the oldest was 14, were put on a boat to America when their parents perished in the Famine."
Transport also flows in the family blood. "Ironically, one grandfather was a trolley driver in Pittsburgh and the other was a senior railway official in Pittsburgh."
How important is his Irish heritage?
"Naturally, the Irish heritage is played up a lot and celebrated in America. When you're brought up in the midst of all that in an inner city, as I was, it can't help but colour your views although I have to say that it was mostly just in the music and the Church as opposed to ideology or the struggles of Ireland."
He also went to a Christian Brother secondary school as well as college.
As a lawyer he undertook pro-bono practice "to give something back to the community."
"I wanted to help people who didn't have hope. I chose to defend neglected children and also involved in the Philadelphia YMCA. It involved adult literacy and was the one place of safety and hope for inner city children who had no place to go but the YMCA. It was not without a little irony because in the old days of my grandfather it was a Protestant stronghold which is why the Catholic Youth Organisation athletic league started in America because Catholics couldn't join the Y's. But fortunately those days are long past."
And what about anti-Americanism?
"I have never had a mean word said to me but encounter a lot of it in the press. I think that it's understandable when you look at America's position in the world. No one likes the New York Yankees, which has a huge footprint in American baseball, and it's hard to like America all the time. But it's also understandable given the situation in Iraq and on other issues like the Kyoto environmental treaty where America has taken a fairly bull-headed stance, at least in the eyes of Europe, and given the perception that America is unwilling to negotiate with people as equals."
I asked if he would agree with Ken Livingstone's characterisation of President Bush as "the greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen."
Not surprisingly, for a consummate diplomat, he preferred to steer clear of political controversy "I was not brought here to make political pronouncements" and he tends to see things through "the transport prism."
I later touched on the case for renationalising the railways to which he parried that "the Tube is everything and more than I can handle, so I'm not looking to extend my responsibilities."
I interviewed him 6 months almost to the day since he began his job of running the Underground, an unenviable task given decades of decay.
He concedes that it is an "enormous challenge, will be very trying for Londoners and will involve disruption in everyone's daily lives."
I suggested that it was a good thing he was a lawyer given the enormously complex contractual arrangements between the state and private companies that is the reality of today's operation.
"One of the reasons they came to me was because I had legal training and won't be intimidated by the legal process. We also need to get back to basics and impose some discipline on our operations, a sort of back to the future approach. I've tried to get some basic accountability and have introduced line general managers so that there is a person who owns that line and everyone feels that they are a part of a smaller group that they can identify with and lead to changed behaviour."
The Tube unions have a record of militancy so I asked if Livingstone's close relations with the unions lead to a step-change in industrial relations and would his return to the Labour Party help?
"I wouldn't presume to comment on the complexity of the political relationships but I do think that I enjoy some reflection from Ken's credibility with the trade unions so we can redefine the relationship. But there's still bad blood in the pipeline and the finances exert a tyranny of their own, whether it's me or Ken or anyone else."
I wished him good luck to which he replied " I'll need it, I'll need it." The long-suffering London commuters who make three million journeys every day on the creaking network hope that this determined Irish-American can renew a system that owes so much to many thousands of other Irish emigrants.
