Mr Michael Bowe says he is used to being called a "do-gooder". His decision several years ago to leave the private sector and head an area-based partnership in one of Dublin's most economically deprived areas has sometimes perplexed even his closest friends.

He sees himself as a friend of the small guy and says that through his work he has ended up involved in "everything that moves in the area".

The Finglas Cabra Partnership headed by him seeks to help a significant number of the 50,000 residents of the two areas to gain employment, either through starting their own business or securing a job in a local firm.

It also offers other services such as education and training and finances itself mainly through EU grants.

In an area with an unemployment rate more than double the national average, the problems he grapples with as chief executive are outside the normal concern of simply growing profits.

Mr Bowe says the challenge of trying to reverse years of economic decline gives him "great satisfaction". His decision to pursue such a career path came after he decided that "total capitalism" left him cold.

He describes "total capitalism" as the point where a company is growing its profits just for the sake of it, with no larger vision of making a difference to the community.

"I spent too many years in the private sector where the only objective was to increase profits," he says. "There is nothing wrong with that, but I just felt I needed more of a challenge," he adds.

Between the years of 1982 and 1985 he ran his own car-servicing business. He says this experience has been important to his later work trying to give people the skills and confidence to start their own business.

At the end of 1985, he finally made the plunge into what he calls "social type of work" with a job as an enterprise officer with the Fingal Development Group. It meant working with people looking to set up their own business as a way to get out of the unemployment trap.

At the time the climate for entrepreneurship was hardly encouraging. Unemployment was at historically high levels, banks were withholding credit and the Finglas area had recently suffered several painful industrial closures.

Eight individuals came to Mr Bowe with business start-up ideas. He recalls that all of them got their ideas off the ground and every morning now he passes a profitable printing business established at that time.

He was bitten by the bug and knew that going back to a "conventional" job was out of the question at that stage. He says he learned an important principle at the time about people starting a business.

"While some of these people made what many would regard as pin money, it was enough to keep one or two people employed and that is no bad thing," he says. He adds that not everybody wants to be "Guinness Ireland or a giant plc".

In 1989, his work with the group ended and he took up another enterprise position in the Coolock area. It was at this time that unemployment began to show a fall, as the budgetary cuts introduced by Mr Ray MacSharry in 1987 started to take effect.

There was little movement in long-term unemployment and Mr Bowe saw no sign of action from the government of the time.

However, in 1991 he says an important development took place. The Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrat government published a report which eventually led to the setting up of a system of 12 area-based partnerships, with five of them in the Dublin area.

While the term partnership is often used as a platitude in official studies, Mr Bowe said the new idea was a true innovation.

"The new approach introduced at the time was to set up organisations which would try to create jobs, but crucially would operate by involving the local community," he says.

This was done by allocating places on the partnership boards to local community representatives, who were joined by trade unionists and employers. As far as Mr Bowe is concerned the whole exercise was about decentralising power.

He applied in September 1991 to head the Finglas Cabra partnership and was surprised when he landed the job. He told the interviewing board he intended to run the partnership along professional business lines and it would not be a charity. He believes this is what secured the post for him.

For the last seven years, he has been grappling with the problems of the two areas and listening to lots of sub-standard argument. "Because of the area I am in working with unemployed people everybody wants to tell me their view of the problem," he says.

"I don't know how many times I have had people tell me during a conversation in a pub that most unemployed people are spongers," he says. He adds that in recent years he has learned the delicate skill of "switching off".

"I just don't bother anymore, I know from my own work that the vast majority of unemployed people want to work," he states.

He now combines his work with the Finglas Cabra Partnership with being chair of the local drugs task force. He says the drugs problem is linked with reducing unemployment in the area. As he puts it bluntly: "It is difficult to get somebody a job it they're strung out on heroin".

His work is often more about changing people's thinking than changing events. He says that increasing the number of young people going on to third level is a priority of the partnership.

"When we started, 0.5 per cent of young people in Finglas went on to third-level education and one of the reasons for this was a problem with parents," he says.

He remembers parents coming to him who would say that sending their child to third-level would cost them "an arm and a leg", even if they had the academic achievements required.

"What we had to do through our various education programmes was to prove to parents that going to third level was a viable option, we had to demystify the whole area for them," he says.

The partnership's way of fostering business in the community is not grant based. "We do not supply grants to those looking to start a business, but offer instead a range of services, from advice on what State supports are available to developing a proper business plan," he says.

Unlike agencies like Forbairt, which deals with companies that have achieved a certain critical mass, the partnership tends to deal with "the person who has a good idea, but whose plan might be a bit all over the place".

"Many of those who come to us have nothing but their idea, so we are working with the purest form of entrepreneurship one can imagine," he says.

Some 80 per cent of the businesses the partnership has assisted since 1991 are still in business. He says the willingness of banks to get involved in start-up ventures has improved in recent years. unless you could show that you would be making massive profits within a short space of time they didn't want to know you," he remembers. He says the banks are now more open to giving loans, once there is a well-thought out business plan and the idea itself has some level of viability.

One story which illustrates the kind of projects the partnership has been involved in, is the tale of a company called Gumbuster International. Mr Richard Tyler, a 56-year-old cleaner working in Dublin City University noticed one morning the huge amount of chewing gum stuck to the ground. He thought to himself that a chewing-gum removal machine might just have a market. He brought the idea to the partnership which helped him develop it. A few years later Smurfit Venture Capital took a 30 per cent stake in the company which now employs almost 30 people. "When I use a phrase like partnership with the community, most people just think it is hot air, but stories like that show that it means something in reality," he says.

He adds: "In the end of the day we are here to get the jobless figures down and we are confident we're doing that."