Catalin Matei arrived in Ireland from his native Romania in the early 1990s, at time when most people's knowledge of the country was formed largely by harrowing television pictures of mentally disturbed children in communist-era orphanages.
Catalin (32) met his wife-to-be, Deborah, in the Romanian capital Bucharest in 1991. She, like hundreds of other Irish people, had played a part in improving conditions in the country's impoverished institutions through fund-raising at home.
The couple settled in Ireland in 1993, several years before thousands of Catalin's fellow nationals began to make their way to these shores to claim asylum or seek work.
Catalin, who has three children, says he feels at home in Ireland, although like many immigrants he feels the welcome of Irish people has become more reserved in recent years.
He acknowledges, and is clearly disappointed, that a certain stigma now attaches to being a Romanian in Ireland. "I'm sure there will come a time when you will be proud to say you're Romanian but we have to work hard here and in Romania to make that come true," he said.
Catalin's tale of self-made business success is typical of that of many first generation immigrants; plenty of hard graft and a few lucky breaks. He started off working in a chip shop, moved on to doing deliveries as a driver and eventually began interpreting for the authorities, initially on a voluntary basis.
This work began to pick up from the mid-1990s when the numbers of Romanians claiming asylum in Ireland climbed into the hundreds and then thousands.
Eventually, with some business training and a €1,200 grant from St Vincent de Paul, Catalin started his own business, equipped only with a mobile phone and a typewriter.
Along with his wife, he now runs a busy interpreting and translating service, Rotext, based in Blanchardstown, Dublin.
The company has 300 freelance interpreters on its books, providing a 24-hour translation and interpretation service throughout the Republic in more than 65 languages, including dialects. Rotext provides interpreters for the courts, prisons and probation services, health boards, hospitals, the Refugee Legal Service and immigration gardaí at ports and airports.
Catalin says his company introduced the service of interpreting over the telephone, with clients on speaker-phones. "If accident and emergency needs information fast to get someone's medical history or if a woman goes into labour and she has no English and needs to consent to an epidural, the doctors can bring a speaker-phone into the room and talk to her straight away," he explained.
Catalin says the Romanian community in Ireland is somewhat fractured and hampered by the lack of a premises to provide a focal point. His recent experience following the death of a Romanian man in Dublin highlights how lonely life can be in Ireland for some immigrants.
"The morgue rang us and the man had no relatives and we organised the Romanian flag and flowers and a priest," he said. "He's in Glasnevin \ and we go from time to time to light a candle. He's 1,500 miles away from home and it was very sad. It's for that that I'm saying we need a community with a proper office."