Taoiseach Brian Cowen launched the first-ever global Irish website, IrishCentral.com in New York last Sunday with a worldwide celebrity crowd of Irish and Irish-Americans in attendance. The launch, which has attracted enormous media interest in the U.S., was covered by The New York Times, the NBC "Today Show," and New York 1.

Actresses Vanessa Redgrave and Roma Downey, and Mark Burnett, the mastermind of top reality TV shows like '"Survivor" also attended the event at the prestigious American Irish Historical Society in New York.

Irish Central, which is owned by Niall O'Dowd, the founder of Irish America Magazine and Irish Voice newspaper, will provide a multimedia broadcast from around the Irish world with news, sports, Irish entertainment, movies, music, theatre, books and TV. The site will also highlight travel, roots research and plain old Irish craic!

O'Dowd said the site had been a long time coming."We have all talked endlessly about the extraordinary power of the Irish Diaspora, now we intend to try and harness it. The global Irish and the internet were made for each other. For generations there was no truly effective way to create the links, now it is entirely possible."

IrishCentral.com claims to have found a community in search of a portal, not the other way around. The audience shows the scope and depth of the global Irish - coming from one land, going to many lands, and now having one "address" on the Internet - that everyone can share and enjoy.

Backed by investors such as Donald Keough (Chairman of investment bank Allen and Company and former president of Coca Cola), Denis Kelleher (Chairman Wall Street Access), Martin Naughton (Chairman Glen Dimplex), Robert Devlin (Chairman Curragh Capital Investments) and Tom McInerney (Chairman of private equity firm Welsh and Carson), IrishCentral.com has assembled a "first-class" team of journalists, designers and IT experts to bring the project to life.

Both Chief Information Officer Joe Pennisi and General Manager Kevin Hayes come from The New York Daily News, where they rebuilt a site which now attracts 10 million unique visitors a month. Editor Kelly Fincham, formerly of the Irish Voice and Irish Independent, has long experience in print and web in Ireland and America.

O'Dowd has long experience in reaching the Irish Diaspora. He said "Despite the economic climate we have reached our target for launch. The support from leading Irish Americans and indeed from the Irish government for the concept behind this site has been tremendous."

He concluded "Irish Central's goal is nothing less than putting a nation's heritage online for the first time, and to reach the 70 million people around the world who identify themselves as Irish. It is an exciting, ambitious mission that we hope will bring a new era to Irish America."

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