A leading internet innovator based in Antrim has played down Ireland’s chances of becoming Europe’s Silicon Valley, despite the investment of €30m in a transatlantic cable.

Blaine Cook, who up to last year was lead architect on Twitter, the micro-blogging social-network site, believes that authorities have underestimated the problems of attracting inward investment and need to understand the difficulties faced by international workers who come to live in Ireland.

Last September the 28-year-old entrepreneur relocated from San Francisco to Whitehead, Co Antrim, where he now works with a project team developing TiddlyWiki for Osmosoft, a BT subsidiary based in London. While he enjoys his new environment, Cook is bewildered by the amount of red tape he has encountered.

Northern Ireland is hoping to develop a hi-tech hub on the strength of the ¤30m cross-border investment in the transatlantic cable network. Work on Project Kelvin, the first direct telecoms link between Ireland and North America, is due to finish in March 2010.

But attempts to buy in international firms through grants will not work in the long term, Cook believes. “The republic managed that to some extent, but what they did was not so much create a tech hub in Ireland as create a tech hub in Europe,” he said. “And they did it by aggressively under-cutting everyone else. Replicating that in the current economic situation would be really difficult. Ireland can’t compete now — they’re losing out to people like Poland.”

Ireland would struggle to rival San Francisco, where pay for tech developers is at least double. Twitter, like Amazon, is incorporated in Delaware, where there is no corporate income tax. Even the republic’s 12.5% can’t rival that.

Cook has encountered non-stop red tape ever since he relocated. “You can’t get a UK credit card unless you are on the electoral register,” he said. “So I went to the electoral office and found that I can’t register until I’ve lived here three months. Then I needed a utility bill, but that takes time too.”

He had to buy a car using his American credit card.

Cook is baffled by the bureaucratic barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, pointing out that if he lived in England he could exchange his Canadian driver’s licence for a British one by sending a cheque for £45 (€52) to the licensing authority. In Northern Ireland, he loses the entitlement to drive on his Canadian licence after a year and will have to apply for a provisional licence and re-sit his test.

Having left Vancouver to make his fortune in Silicon Valley, Cook moved to Northern Ireland after leaving Twitter last year because he was “excited” by the quality and the enthusiasm of its tech community. “Any of these people could find work in San Francisco tomorrow. But it’s a really, really hard thing to attract inward investment based on new technology,” he said.

He is surprised at how little Twitter is used in Ireland compared with America. Politicians north and south appear much less internet-savvy than their American counterparts. Cook knows of only one MLA, Dawn Purvis of the Progressive Unionist party, who is a Twitter user.

Twitter has experienced huge growth as a political and business tool on top of its original role as a social network site. Barack Obama used it in his presidential campaign, while the story of the Hudson air landing was broken by a Twitter photograph. Last week the British Labour party announced plans for all its MPs to have Twitter profiles on their constituency websites.

“It’s funny — journalists and politicians in the rest of the world are paying attention to Twitter,” said Cook. “Posts from democracy websites such as Mysociety.com alerting people to issues like MPs trying to roll back on disclosure of their expenses has contributed to an acceleration of political action.”

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