WHAT'S the difference between being an immigrant entrepreneur in Ireland today and an Irish immigrant in 19th century America?

It took the Kennedys four generations to break into the mainstream of American culture. One generation set down roots, another built on those roots, the third made a fortune and the fourth used the fortune to become president of the United States. There is probably a future taoiseach out there with a Polish name, but if things go well, it won't take four generations for him or her to get there.

The first article I wrote for a national newspaper back in 1998 was about a new phenomenon, an African grocery store on Parnell Street, at the north end of O'Connell St, in Dublin. It was the first shop of its kind I had seen, and that was the simple, stand-alone hook for the story . . . 'An African shop on Parnell Street'.

Ten years later, that novelty value alone wouldn't warrant a newspaper article.

There are ethnic food shops, restaurants and hairdressers dotted all over the country.

Parnell Street has gone through its 'little Africa' phase and now seems to be going into its 'little China' phase.

The evidence of ethnic minority entrepreneurs is all around us . . . new immigrant communities are becoming firmly established, and Bank of Ireland estimates that something like 80 to 100 new immigrant businesses are set up every month.

"Immigrants have been a powerful source of innovation and entrepreneurship, " wrote Richard Florida in his book, The Rise of Creativity. "Those who choose to leave their countries are predisposed to risk and can be thought of as 'innovative outsiders'. It seems obvious too that people and groups facing obstacles in traditional organisations are more likely to start their own enterprises, and the facts bear that out."

Immigrant communities in other countries tend to be more entrepreneurial than their host societies. The Irish community in 19th century New York huddled together, distrusted by the mainstream community, and the nascent Irish businessmen chose to sell goods and services to one another rather than blending straightaway into the melting pot of America.

In Ireland today, new arrivals congregate in a similar way for mutual support and information. Nowadays, there are of course additional factors . . . due to globalisation, some of the migrants see themselves as temporary visitors, and thanks to modern technology, broadband, internet cafes and cheap air travel, the connection to the motherland is arguably stronger and more persistent. It is the business communities that set down the lasting roots.

Such immigrant communities did not really exist when Anthuan Xavier, founder of accountancy firm BDO Simpson Xavier and current chairman of Wealth Property Solutions, first came to this country from Malaysia.

"When I came here, foreigners were such a minority that there was no such community, " he says. "So I didn't even think about it. I just integrated into the Irish community. As an immigrant you didn't have the creature comforts of family support or longstanding friends and if you don't succeed the alternative could, at an extreme, be the gutter."

Xavier is not really representative of the current crop of New Irish, however. For that you have to look to people like Paddy Song, who owns a spread of restaurants, shops and hairdressers, as well as the Chinese community newspaper The Shining Emerald.

All in all, he is behind over 30 businesses.

Song has very ambitious plans to turn Parnell Street into Ireland's Chinatown complete with Chinese lanterns, rickshaws and signs in Chinese characters. He has lived and done business in France and Sweden, but he has been here since 2000 and finds Ireland to be by far the best place to do business.

"The residency thing isn't that complicated here, " he says. "You do the business and you pay the tax. It's very different from France, for example. So a lot of people are starting businesses here. It is an attractive country to do business in."

He does worry, however, about current justice department proposals to get people to re-register their residency and reprove their identity after two years. For many business people contributing to our economy, this can be very difficult and disruptive.

With this in mind, the community network is all-important and nowadays it stretches all the way back to the home country. The connection with the burgeoning Chinese economy, for example, is strong, and much of the money for Chinese business enterprises in Ireland is coming in from China through family and friends. Furthermore, much of the advice on how business works filters from one immigrant businessperson to another.

"We need leaders, " says Paddy Song. "I'm not saying that I'm a leader, but I try to be open to people, and if newcomers have business ideas or need advice my door is open.

If there's a thriving business community, it's good for everyone, everyone is happy."

Chinedu Onyejelem, the Nigerian publisher of the multicultural newspaper Metro Eireann, contends that it is perfectly natural for ethnicminority businesspeople to start by servicing small, local communities, because they are usually funded by the same communities.

"If I have a business plan which needs 5 million I won't be able to fund it, " he says.

"If I have a business that needs 50,000 I can reach out to family and friends and get personal loans. Right now I think action is needed to encourage more people to establish businesses, whether mainstream or communityfocused. What I am concerned about is the lack of support. I would like the bank to have a proactive approach towards lending to immigrants."

Dr Tom Cooney of the Institute of Minority Entrepreneurship at DIT sees a danger in such businesspeople's overreliance on their own immediate ethnic group.

"One thing that concerns me most is that they have tended to start up businesses targeted only at their own communities, " says Cooney.

"In many situations the market isn't big enough to sustain the business. Anecdotally, there is a high failure rate among such businesses because it is becoming an overcrowded marketplace. It would also help integration to look outward. If you're going into an African store to buy foodstuffs then you're more likely to understand where they've come from and to appreciate the challenges that they face."

Others believe that mainstreaming of ethnic businesses happens naturally after a period of time. Sergey Tarutin is the Russian-born publisher and distributor of six newspapers targeted at eastern European communities, including Russians, Polish, Lithuanians and Latvians.

He distributes to over 200 eastern-European shops around the country and sees about five new ones start up every month. Tarutin can already see a change taking place.

"My kids are more Irish than Russian, so they have more Irish needs, " he says.

"So similarly, our shops will soon stock pork sausages and bacon alongside our own ethnic produce. The mainstream shops are beginning to serve the ethnic communities, and the ethnic shops are beginning to serve the local people as well. I'm even thinking of doing an English language publication."

Unlike other countries at other times in history, integration and equality are conscious if under-funded parts of public policy. Emerge is an EU-funded development partnership which assists ethnic minority businesses. Ken Germaine, chief executive of the Base Enterprise Centre in Blanchardstown, who runs the programme, sees it as hugely important to tap his entrepreneurs into the mainstream business networks.

"If you look at the Irish in Liverpool and in America, they started out servicing their own communities but as they grew they began servicing the mainstream and that's not an unusual path for many entrepreneurs to follow, " he says. "One of the things we've been successful in doing at Emerge is preventing them from going into an overpopulated marketplace. We encourage anybody we're dealing with to look at the market as the whole market."

Programmes such as Emerge focus on language, cultural and legislative barriers. Entrepreneurs tend to be the ideal testing ground for integration because, as Sergey Tarutin points out, unlike other migrants, businesspeople usually plan to stay here.

With this in mind, connections to the wider business community are crucial.

Ken Germaine commends Blanchardstown chamber of commerce and the Small Firms Association in particular for engaging with this.

Patricia Callan of the SFA is adamant that we are in a unique and positive position.

"We're the last country in Europe to become a net migratory country so we have the lessons of the whole world to learn from, " she says. "We realised right from the start that this was going to be a core market of the future and it makes sense for us to fit in with it. And if we do it right and we don't just wait for the issue to come knocking on our door, we won't end up with the problems other countries have faced in terms of integration issues. And it's working for us . . . we had a series of business-to-business meetings last year to launch our awards, and in any of the rooms about 20% of the people attending were non-nationals."

People from ethnic minorities make up about 10% or 15% of the Irish market. That's a market share that the indigenous businesses can't ignore and it is in their interest to network with businesspeople from those communities to create and share these opportunities.

"In terms of selling concepts to people there's a huge element of 'what's in this for me?'" says Callan. "Well, there are huge opportunities here. No business survives by itself. All the signs are that this is a pool of entrepreneurial talent and if we can tap into that and market that, then that will sustain Irish indigenous businesses as well, in terms of the supply chain."

Chinedu Onyejelem concurs. "Those who know the benefits of multiculturalism are getting involved, " he says.

"When Denis O'Brien formed Esat he was one of the first to manufacture and produce telephone call cards for ethnic minorities. I remember people were lining up to buy minutes from Esat to ring their home countries. He had the vision. He saw what was happening and he tapped into it."

And the benefits stretch beyond immigrant business communities and beyond the Irish market. Paddy Song notes that, when it comes to Irish companies doing business in other markets, it might be smart to work with the immigrant entrepreneurs from those markets who are resident here. The world has got smaller. In the past, immigrants left the old country behind, while nowadays it can feature in the business plan.

Marius Tsedi from Nigeria has been in Ireland for three years and has just gone through the Emerge programme. His business plan involves trade links between Ireland and Nigeria. A former oil industry employee with C Petroleum and Gas, he is looking for capital investors to fund a 5,000 metric-tonne vessel to transport petroleum products in Nigerian waters. He is very optimistic about what Ireland has to offer.

"I saw that Ireland was the fastest-growing economy in Europe, " he says. "I felt that it would be one of the leading countries with which I would like to do business. You could come here as a young man and become a millionaire the next day. In Nigeria you have to have a family name and a family background before you get into the inner circles of the business. Here it's about networking and anyone can do it."

Ireland is at an early stage of the game when it comes to mass immigration. It is not 19th century America. It is a small island that can learn from the mistakes of all the countries that went before. There is no reason why we shouldn't handle it in a way that benefits everyone.

"If you look at Silicon Valley in the US, the majority of the businesses that were set up there over the past few years were set up by ethnic people, " says Chinedu Onyejelem. "That could happen here."

We should look after all our entrepreneurs, Irish and immigrant, and everyone needs to be encouraged to think big. The indigenous Irish are relatively new to such a thriving economy themselves, and when it comes to entrepreneurialism, all the Irish are in a strange new country.