WILD GEESE:Colm Murphy, General manager, Servier pharmaceuticals, Poland

COLM MURPHY bucked the trend. At a time when tens of thousands of eastern European workers were heading for Celtic Tiger Ireland, he headed the other way to Poland, where he now heads up the local operations of French pharmaceuticals giant Servier.

Murphy qualified as a pharmacist in 1996. After working for two years in Crumlin hospital and as a community pharmacist, he decided he “wanted a break from Dublin” and applied to work with Servier in Arklow, Co Wicklow. “They turned around and asked in the interview if I wanted to work in France, and I said why not.”

After a year with Servier in Orléans in central France, he started work in Poland, helping with the acquisition of a manufacturing company there. He is now general manager of the facility. “The group wanted to have somebody on the ground to facilitate investment there, and transfer technology and know-how from our main manufacturing facilities in France to Warsaw.”

Murphy’s field is the manufacturing and “end-stage development” of drugs, and he helped to upgrade the Polish facility to international manufacturing standards. It manufactures Servier’s products for the Polish market.

He says that after the fall of communism in eastern Europe in 1989, Servier was one of the first companies to invest in the region.

Before assuming his current role, Murphy spent three years in Moscow establishing a manufacturing operation to supply Servier’s cardiac and endocrinology products to the local market.

The company was one of the first multinationals to enter the Russian market, and he reports that Russian authorities were “very keen” to see investment.

The “pharmaceutical industry was left to stagnate and they’ve lost a lot of know-how”, says Murphy. The country had become almost completely dependent on imports, and for Russia, independence in the supply of drugs is important. He talks of a large pool of people with technical and scientific knowledge.

He says Moscow, with its 14 million residents, has “an overpowering size”, and he considers Warsaw a better place to raise children (his eldest son is three). He returned there last September.

Poland “in quality of life terms is a very easy place to live”, according to Murphy, and “from a family point of view, Warsaw is fantastic”.

His wife, Eimear, worked with the IDA, and they met at a wedding of a mutual friend in Dublin. She moved with him to Moscow in 2006.

He rejects the idea that a soviet-type bureaucracy lingers in Poland.

“They would definitely be very liberal in terms of competition. They have been very heavily influenced by their will to join the EU, Nato and all that; and want to be much closer to the West. That’s been policy of the government since the start in 1989 pretty much – you feel that. Coming from Moscow back to Warsaw, it’s only two hours by plane, but you really feel the impact of the EU and that they are very western-leaning.”

He says you find Irish people everywhere in the business world. In Moscow, Servier’s factory was built with the assistance of Irish engineering company PM Group, and says that in Warsaw “either professionally or socially or through sport, you would come across Irish people”.

He recently helped set up, along with other Irish expatriates, a Gaelic football club, Cumann Warszawa.

For young graduates Murphy enthusiastically reaffirms the old cliche that you need to “broaden your horizons”. Murphy, who speaks Polish, Russian and French, emphasises the importance of learning languages, saying they are an “important part of showing openness when you arrive in a different country and becoming involved in the local culture”.

For young people, while Poland still has economic growth, and was the only country in the EU to escape recession in 2009, he says “the curve has flattened out a bit, compared to what it was in the late 90s”. In the future high growth will be found in economies such as Russia, where he sees huge potential.

In contrast to Ireland, which had the largest recession in the developed world, Poland’s attitude has been “crisis? What crisis?” He says “a big part of it was their conservative banking practices”, along with the ability to devalue the currency, and EU investment.

On his travels, he says his Irishness has “definitely” helped him, and that Irish people benefit from a lack of “historical baggage” and from “being perceived as not being threatening”.

Murphy looks like he’ll stay put for now. While he returns with his children to Ireland about three times a year, he says “that’s gonna get more difficult as they get older”. But he doesn’t rule it out. “My wife being Irish, we would hope to go back at some stage in the medium to long term.”

In the meantime, Donal (3) and Fionn (1) look set to line out for Cumann Warszawa before long.