Conor O'Clery, North America Editor, finds Pittsburgh eager to attract investment.

My meeting with Ronnie Bryant wasn't so much an interview as a slide show. He propped a laptop on the table and began calling up electronic pages.

They illustrated how his city has the lowest crime rate among the top 50 metro areas in the United States. It is the safest US city for pedestrians and children. It is the third cleanest city in the US. It also has a low cost of living. It has more performing arts groups than Broadway. It has the second-rated skyline in America. It has more golf courses (184) than any other metropolitan region and more bridges than any city in the world except Venice.

It was a sales pitch made more convincing by the brilliant sunshine of a late spring day.

Pittsburgh in south-west Pennsylvania is certainly no longer the smoke-stack steel town of popular imagination. It is a sparkling metropolis with a diversified economy which wants to attract more investment from abroad.

Mr Bryant is president of the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance which, along with the Ireland Institute of Pittsburgh, is sending the city's first investment mission to Ireland from May 30th to June 7th. The delegation will travel to Dublin and Belfast as well as Newry and Dundalk, with the dual aim of attracting Irish companies to invest in the Pittsburgh area, and of finding opportunities for south-west Pennsylvania companies to invest in Ireland.

They will meet Invest Northern Ireland, the Dundalk Institute of Technology, the Newry and Mourne District Council and Enterprise Ireland.

The alliance, formed six years ago to promote business links with other states and countries, lists only one Irish enterprise already in the Pittsburgh area - the high-end kitchen-ware maker All-Clad Metalcrafters, a brand of Waterford Wedgwood, which has its divisional headquarters in Washington County and employs 64 people.

"Based on the current number of Irish-based companies in the Pittsburgh region, we recognise that there is great potential for bilateral investment," said Mr Bryant with some understatement.

Interest in Ireland has long been encouraged by the Irish Institute of Pittsburgh, a voluntary organisation presided over by Sr Michele O'Leary which promotes mutual understanding between the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland and job creation throughout Ireland. It has encouraged dozens of young people from the North to work and learn in Pittsburgh for three-year periods under the Walsh visa programme.

The Irish connection has also been enhanced by Mr Dan Rooney, the legendary president of the Pittsburgh Steelers American football team, whose grandfather came from Newry, a town he frequently visits. He has hosted Northern Ireland leaders such as Mr John Hume, Dr Ian Paisley, Mr David Trimble and Mr Seamus Mallon in Pittsburgh over the years.

The Steelers president was also involved in the American Fund for Ireland, founded by former Pittsburgh resident Sir Anthony O'Reilly, who retired three years ago as chairman and chief executive of H.J. Heinz, which has its world headquarters in Pittsburgh.

Mr Rooney now sees a chance for Irish investment in Pittsburgh. "This is the best place to come for business," he said in his office beside the Steelers' huge state-of-the-art stadium on the Allegheny River bank where the massive steel works once stood.

"Pittsburgh is one of the great places in American to live. In Silicon valley in California, it would cost you a million dollars for a 'nothing' house, but here for a hundred or two hundred thousand you'll get a mansion."

There was never quite the same close connection between Ireland and Pittsburgh as New York or Boston had, said Mr Ted Smyth, senior vice-president and chief administrative officer of Heinz, but the Irish Institute has for a decade been "fighting the good fight" in promoting Pittsburgh investment in the Border areas and encouraging young Irish people to work in Pittsburgh as interns.

Today the Pittsburgh region is home to 324 foreign-owned firms from 26 countries headed by Germany, Britain, Canada, Japan and France, and it maintains bilateral alliances with several regions in Europe. Since the era of steel, it has diversified into information technology, life sciences, advanced manufacturing, robotics, healthcare and financial services.

Some US companies based in Pittsburgh already have investments in Ireland, like Extrude Hone Corporation - the inventor of the "silly putty" method of cleaning machines, which has a successful operation in Shannon.

Mellon Financial Corporation, the Pittsburgh-based global financial services giant, invested in a Dublin operation in 1955 and its Global Securities Services in Harcourt Street administers more than $14 billion (€12 billion) in assets.

Mellon sees Dublin as an area of strong growth, said Mr Padelford Lattimer, first vice-president. "Up to the early 1990s, 63 per cent of assets invested around the world were in the US. "That mix has been changing. The majority of those assets are now in Europe."

To enter the European market- place, "you're looking at growth coming from one of two places in most cases and I think that Dublin is more attractive than Luxumbourg".

"Dublin's a wonderful city, you can feel the energy, and much of that is due to the critical mass of financial services," he said in an interview in the bank's headquarters in downtown Pittsburgh. Dublin provided "bright well-educated people who understand the fund business, who understand money management and are very hard working", good trade organisations, an attractive tax base, transparency, positive regulation and available training.

Pittsburgh has its own impressive list of incentives. Mr Bryant noted that Pennsylvania was "very competitive" in reducing the costs of doing business, with tax breaks, plants and grants.

The region has several sites where foreign businesses pay no local or state taxes for 12 years and has $1.5 billion in venture capital.

The Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, which hosted The Irish Times visit, has previously sent delegations to other European countries and now sees opportunities in Ireland, said Mr Bryant. With the expansion of the Irish economy, they believed Ireland offered a chance to expand its "global mission" of building bilateral alliances and facilitating foreign direct investment.