In most American cities I go to they do a pretty respectable breakfast but in Birmingham, daybreak is their speciality - as you can see from the pic above.
I was back in Alabama last week to put finishing touches to the Irish Roundtable in the Magic City conference scheduled for 9-10 October.
This latest visit only served to confirm my view that venturing off the beaten track and building a bridge to the Capital of the Black Civil Rights Movement and the epicentre of the Scots-Irish community will reap mutually beneficial rewards for my native city of Belfast and Birmingham.
For while Belfast has certainly advanced further in attracting tech sector FDI, Birmingham with one million people in its metro area has us beat when it comes to investing in the future - University of Alabama at Birmingham alone has three times the research budget of Queen's University Belfast & Ulster University combined.
THE WAY WE WERE: An artwork showing the fire hoses used on civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham
No wonder then that a team of trailblazers will be travelling out from Ireland for this Birmingham meet-up on the theme of 'Seizing the AI Opportunity'.
They will discover Birmingham has the most exciting tech potential of any city in the Southern States of the USA. Indeed, the city's burgeoning tech scene has spawned a dizzying array of new initiatives: the annual SLOSS Tech conference, the TechBirmingham network, the Birmingham AI coalition, the Innovation Depot with its 100-start-up strong accelerator and the Innovate Alabama initiative which is funding many of those early-stage enterprises.
EYE-OPENER: With Cynthia Crutchfield of Innovate Alabama and Birmingham business leader Mark Jackson
You won't find many O'Flahertys or O'Reillys below the Mason-Dixie Line but scanning the names of the police officers on a diner wall roster last week, I did however see an Adair, a McClure and a McKinney. Ulster men and true.
All we have to do now is share our proceedings — firstly at an opening night reception in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and then on 10 October at our roundtable in the Harbert Center — with Alabama's entrepreneurs, founders and civic champions.
When we teamed up with Giancarlo Di Vece of Unosquare at the start of 2024 and announced we were going to spotlight the best of Belfast in Birmingham and shine a light on the luminous Magic City, he was delighted. After all, Unosquare has a significant software operation in Birmingham and in Belfast.
However, some of our biz buddies in Belfas were a little sniffy about the project: "Do I really need to get two planes to get there?" "Do they have a tech sector?" were among the dubious inquiries.
In fact, one eminent businessman, who prospered in Belfast in the 1990s, asked me if Birmingham wasn't a little dangerous!
Our transatlantic company Aisling Events could stick to Boston, San Francisco and New York — all places in which we run unique conferences — but the magic happens when you strike out for pastures new.
Indeed, the timidity of some of the top biz bros reminds me of a handful of Irish American business leaders I met 25 years ago, when, as a lowly city councillor, I urged them to come to Belfast to build the peace with jobs.
A few rolled their eyes back then - others wondered if they would need a security detail to leave the Europa Hotel. Today, their eyes would pop with amazement at Belfast transformed!
Now that our programme for the Irish Roundtable in the Magic City is finalised, with speakers from three Continents and 15 cities, we are set to kick-start a new BFF relationship between two great cities — Belfast and Birmingham — which, fingers crossed, will leave us all equally star-struck.
