And it takes a special kind of resolve not to crawl back under the covers and go back to sleep until the nightmare is over.

Westpark Shannon director and vice president Reg Freake certainly doesn't give the impression of a retiring type. You could forgive the voluble Canadian for ducking the fight over the loss of Heathrow flights from Shannon and calling a halt to Westpark, but with phase one of the sevenblock campus complete and phase two well-underway there's no turning back. Which means someone's in for a fight.

"We've always had a little bit of a doubt about Aer Lingus, " he says.

"Because if someone won't come over to talk to you, you know something is going on. At the same time, even not that long ago, they were giving the airport assurances and we were never given any impression that things were going to change. Even though in the back of the mind there is a nagging feeling. It's like guerrilla warfare. You go into the jungle and you don't know who the enemy is or how to fight them."

The "enemy" is in plain sight now, but while various parties squabble over the arcana of corporate governance . . . to say nothing of cabinet politics . . . Freake has a business to look after.

"We have the first phase up and running and the second phase nearly finished, with a tenant, GE Capital, going into that building. We are taking a very positive entrepreneurial approach on this thing, but in the meantime we just can't put everything on hold."

Getting a tenant like GE Capital . . . on a list with Digital River, Schwarz Pharma, Genesis and Enterprise Ireland . . .

underlines the stakes in play for the Shannon region. It's not just crumbs for the cabinet table they're howling over; it's the prospect of sinking from a top tier location for multinational outposts to a straggler in the march of global capital.

"GE's senior people are going to be flying in and out of here but that's just one example, " Freake says. "Dell's customers are flying in, Nortel's are.

Dell would be the biggest industrial type of employer in the region."

As an old Dell hand, Freake has a good idea of what boxes need to be ticked for a major international business to settle in Shannon. There's tax, grants, labour . . . all areas where Ireland ranks high in the world league table . . . but then the decision is about what region, what city. That's where it's about to get tricky for Westpark.

"They want physical connectivity by air, but also connectivity to the universities and the education system, connectivity via road to major urban centres to attract employees and expertise and they also need telecoms connectivity, because companies today want to be connected worldwide, wherever they are, " says Freake in full sales pitch mode. "Those are all the kind of things that they'd go through at an executive level and then they'd narrow it down to a specific town and send in the troops and start to negotiate."

He doesn't say so, but Shannon . . . in the worst case scenario . . . could be facing a situation where the only "troops" passing through town are American GIs en route to their next deployment in the Middle East . . . not exactly the sort of profile Westpark is looking for.

In his favour, though, Reg has thought big when it comes to telecoms infrastructure. Westpark boasts a carrier neutral facility for tenants allowing them to choose their communications supplier from up to six carriers who will all be vying for clients on the site. Reg believes that this service will become the norm in business parks in the future . . . facilitating multiple carriers to service the park with a view to offering the tenant a good deal for their data needs. Westpark also offers a data centre for storage of information.

He's coy about who might be coming to Westpark next, though, and with so much up in the air regarding Shannon, perhaps it suits his purposes to keep things quiet on that front while turning up the volume in Dublin's direction.

But in explaining just why his potential clients have to remain a secret, Freake lets slip an explanation for why Aer Lingus might have decided to spring a surprise on Shannon rather than engage in any kind of consultation with the regional stakeholders.

"These decisions are made at the really senior executive level, probably by the board, and they hold their cards very close to their chest, " he explains. "I've entertained and hosted visits and we don't even know who the company is. They would assure us that they are a big company worldwide, they are sending us a team, but they can't tell us who they are. The reason why they won't tell you in many casesfthey can't afford to have that kind of information going to the general public. It's for various reasons, including stock market reasons - it could affect some type of labour situation in some of those countries."

Indeed. But how does Reg woo them in that case?

"Well, first of all we don't lie to them."

CV

REG FREAKE

Job: Director and vice president of Westpark Shannon
Career: also president of Limerick Chamber of Commerce, director on the board of Shannon Airport Authority and director in the Midwest American Chamber of Commerce; previously spent 15 years at Dell Computers . . .10 of them in Limerick where he was most recently responsible for executive customer relations Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Personal: born in Newfoundland, Canada and married to Waterford woman Jeanne