“HOW did we react to the (London) attacks? We took all the staff into Green Park with two grand’s worth of booze and got shitfaced!” When it comes to an absence of newspeak, you’ve got it to hand it to Norman Crowley, 1990s millionaire and dotcom veteran. The chief executive of Inspired Broadcast Networks, has a refreshingly unorthodox line in public relations patter.

While the British trade press has seized on Inspired Broadcast Networks’ sexy positioning in the electronic gaming space with barely a nod towards Crowley’s previous incarnation, there are plenty of people in Ireland who remember him. In fact, we remember him very well.

As one of the founders of what became Ebeon, Eircom’s abortive internet play and the highest-profile dotcom casualty of the era, “Norm”, as his staff like to call him, became a bit of a poster boy for dotcom excess — Celtic tiger style.

Six years later, he is more than happy to laugh about a crazy period that saw him make millions — and go wallop — all by the age of 32.

At the time of Ebeon’s demise, Crowley’s input was limited to being a non-executive director, but the company had been his brainchild since he discovered “a thing called the internet” back in 1996.

Ebeon, which began life as a computer services outfit called The Solutions Group, morphed into The Trinity Group by 1998, at which stage it claimed to be the biggest internet services company in Ireland. Being the biggest in a new market might not have meant much were it not for the looming dotcom boom that was just beginning to grip investors.

“At the time, Denis O’Brien was preparing to take Esat public,” recalled Crowley. “You couldn’t take a company public at the time without an internet play and we were in talks with Esat. Eircom heard and suddenly we were in the middle of a bidding war.”

Eircom, or Telecom Eireann as it then was, eventually paid £21m (€26.67m) for 51% of The Trinity Group, making the former welder from Clonakilty one of Ireland’s first tech-bubble millionaires.

And then the good times kicked in. Crowley was famous in late-night Dublin for bringing his cronies around town in a fleet of limos, stopping merely to recharge the champagne stocks in the in-car cooler.

He laughs at the memory.

“Oh, I could tell you a few stories all right. The one that springs to mind is the time we took 80 people in limos to our house in Wicklow for a party. It all went very well. A few days later, the little old lady down the road cornered me and said it must have been a very fancy funeral.”

When the dotcom bubble popped, Eircom’s new financial director took a hard look at the company’s loss-making internet businesses and didn’t like what he saw. In March 2001, Ebeon became history.

The limo fleet may be stood down but Inspired Broadcast Networks is very much up and running and on target to achieve sales of €27m this year. The company’s bread and butter operation is fixed-odds betting terminals, with 8,000 machines operating in the UK.