Patrick Frison-Roche is hoping so, anyway. He recently decided to base Hopscotch Europe, a subsidiary of Hopscotch PR, the second-largest independent public relations consultancy in France, in Dublin 2. He expects to employ five or six people by the end of the year.

"We looked at London, Amsterdam, some other places, but we chose Dublin, " Frison-Roche said. "The city has a great reputation in international business as a place that's growing and extremely dynamic. It used to be, you were ringing up places around Europe and said you were calling from Dublin and people might wonder. Now it just makes sense to people."

What really made Dublin attractive, however, was the prospect of hiring people who would have the skills to serve in the French Foreign Legion of PR.

"In Dublin you have offices for most of the big agencies.

Many of them have people who are, say, from Italy but have worked in France and Britain, or from Denmark but have worked in Germany and Sweden, that sort of thing.

But that skill set isn't valued by a traditional agency."

Frison-Roche was previously the French MD for the technology PR firm Text100.

Prior to that he worked in Edelman PR's London office.

In both cases he oversaw work for pan-European clients and, he says, saw an opportunity.

PR agency budgets for a campaign across multiple countries, involving more than one agency office, can typically include a 15% coordination fee to cover the additional time involved in just getting different offices to arrange to issue the same press release and prepare invoices. Hopscotch says it will simply do it all from one location, possible if you have people with the necessary market knowledge and language skills.

"If I call a journalist based in London, she doesn't care that I'm not in another part of London. Neither does the client. I might be in Dublin, have a client in Belgium and a journalist in London and put them together on Skype [the internet calling service that now offers video conferencing]. In fact, because we use Skype so much we often see our clients more than someone who's just across town, " he adds.

Frison-Roche stresses that he doesn't claim any special technology advantage over other agencies, merely a different business model.

"Our model applies to small to mid-size PR budgets in Europe, between 100,000 and 300,000 a year, spread across four or five countries, " he says. For these clients he claims he can run a basic media relations campaign from Dublin for a lot less.

Other factors in Dublin's favour were a flexible labour force that actually costs less to employ.

"When you pay someone in Ireland, say, 10,000, it costs just over 11% in addition to the employer, so just over 11,000. To employ the same person in France on 10,000 it costs the employer 15,000, in Sweden 14,600, in Germany 13,100, in Spain, 14,000, in Italy a bit less than that."

The UK and Amsterdam came out similar to Ireland in terms of cost, but "Dublin has a dynamic. It's a centre of European business in a way that Amsterdam isn't."