Maybe they should rename it Oircom

Those unfortunate Wall Street investment bankers -- caught out by their assumption that a former Irish state-owned company, with an Irish-sounding name, and operating in Ireland is actually Irish! Because as Saturday's Irish Times reported (subs. req'd):

Goldman Sachs, the investment bank which led the €1.15 billion re-flotation of Eircom [main Irish phone company] in March, has acknowledged it made an embarrassing error over the company's nationality...

Goldman issued a statement to the stock exchange yesterday stating it had an interest in 44.5 million shares in Eircom last March. It said that it had not notified its interest in the shares earlier because it thought Eircom was an Irish company, when in fact it is registered in England...The ownership of Eircom was transferred to a UK shelf company in July 2003 as part of a financial restructuring...

Now while GS made the technical error here, who can blame them? This is precisely the sort of situation that leads enterprising bloggers to coin the name Shamrockshire for our republic, and it also epitomises the crony capitalism of the place, since the change in company registration was made to facilitate a big payout to a group of investors including "Sir" Tony O'Reilly, Oirish media magnate. The long-term risk (as the investment bankers might say) is that if the Americans are getting confused about what's Irish and what's English, will at some point they just stop seeing a reason to visit Ireland anymore?