"I was accepting this award and I did know what to say. I'd been thinking for some time about what it meant to be Irish living in America, because obviously, having come here in 1987, my sense of being Irish and my sense of being American are things that I constantly think about."

The chair in which Byrne is reflecting on his transatlantic sense of self is in a corner of a Greenwich Village hotel where he once lived after his apartment was flooded.

It's a welcoming place, a bright and warm space. As if inspired by an "old familiar," and along with his reflections on identity, Byrne is especially thinking about space and place.

As such, the Dublin-born actor is the leading voice in an effort to develop an all embracing Irish Center in Manhattan, a place where Irishness, in all its forms, can be nurtured, expressed and perhaps even explained.

"I would say that I am probably still as Irish as I was the day I left in 1987 in many, many ways but there's a part of me for sure that has been influenced by living in this country, obviously. But after a time you begin to ask what does it mean to be Irish, Irish American," said Byrne, whose career has recently hit a new high mark with his Emmy Award nomination for outstanding lead actor in a drama series, in his case the role of "Paul" in the HBO series "In Treatment."

"If you live in a city like Dublin, you're constantly surrounded by a kind of invisible community," said Byrne. "You can walk from O'Connell Street to Stephen's Green and you're bound to meet somebody; you're part of the community without feeling privileged or feeling that it's something you're entitled to. It just is the way it is.

"And when you leave your city of birth, or belonging, and you move to another place, something fundamentally changes inside you and you become part of the place that you go to; and in a way you don't ever belong to the place that you've left in quite the same way again," Byrne said.

"There's before you leave, and after you leave. It's an interesting phenomenon the way the returning Irish person is treated. For example, in Tom Murphy's play "The White House," which is about a guy who goes back, he goes into the local pub and it's about how he's perceived and treated.

"The person who never leaves the town has a different view of the world than you have, so there's the conflict between the returning person and the person who has never left. It can be a benign kind of conflict, but sometimes it can have an edge of malevolence about it, that there's some kind of betrayal at having left the tribe."

This, Byrne said, could transfer itself to a view of people, and, in the case of Ireland, Irish Americans returning to look for their roots being seen by the native Irish as somehow naïve, gullible and deserving of ridicule.

"I know many people here who left Ireland when they were teenagers or in their twenties, not because they wanted to, but because they had to leave. And they never got the chance to go back there again so they, perforce, had to become more American in a way than Irish.

"So I got to thinking about what you lose when you move from one city, or country, to another. You lose that invisible web that surrounds you. And then you come here and look for it and say where is it here? And I started to look around at what constituted the Irish community in New York and I found it to be a very fractured community. There's this group over here that never meets this group, and this group in Queens that has never come in contact with these people.

"There are some communities that have a very nostalgic and slightly unreal view of the Ireland that they left, or that their parents or grandparents left. And there's people who people who feel a certain amount of alienation. So really, in the end, there's a series of fractured communities, and yet they all came under this tattered umbrella of being Irish American.

"But I felt there was no sense of community, or belonging to a community. Once a year maybe you went to the Irish Arts Center and you met people and didn't see then again for a year. These were people from all walks of life, different professions, and from different counties. What I took for granted in Dublin I don't have here," Byrne said.

"In a way that's good because it forces you out into cross cultural influences, but on the other hand the need to be with your own, that thing that Brian Friel talks about in "Translations," the need to be with your own community, is a very powerful one. So having thought about that I thought to myself, where is the center of it, a center of the Irish community?"

As Byrne looked around in search of an answer to this question, he discovered that there was no center in the physical sense.

"Usually, culture has some kind of a center, a building, some place that you can go," he said.

"Even the British have managed to do that here with Soho house, a big building in the center of the city where you can meet people and operate on a business, social and cultural level. There is no place like that for Irish people. So I started to think, well, wouldn't it be great if we had a place where people could go, where people could connect, where that thing that defines Irish American culture could be seen and begin to grow.

"So I started to look around at other ethnic minorities in New York so see what they had done."

That looking had Byrne crossing paths with famed dancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov.

"Baryshnikov," said Byrne, "took this same idea and in three years and through private investment built this center and now has it rented out."

But while the Irishman had questions for the Russian, the Russian also had some for the Irishman.

"Baryshnikov said to me, where are the Irish? You people built this city and there's no real representation of what you have contributed here. Where is the Irish community?

"And so I went down to the Irish Arts Center, on West 51st Street and 12th Avenue, and no disrespect to anybody at the Irish Arts Center but if you look at that arts center as being reflective of what we think about our culture - it's inaccessible, it's difficult to get to, it's hardly funded."

Looking around town, Byrne found concluded that other centers of Irish art and culture in the city were similarly contributing but in a piecemeal way, or were as he put it, "limping along."

"There's nothing there that is actually contributing to the growth of an indigenous Irish American culture," he said.

"It seems to me that we have become reflective of the culture that is in the island of Ireland. Every so often Conor McPherson or Martin McDonagh, or Riverdance comes over. It's coming out of the island of Ireland.

"When you think about who was the last great, Irish American playwright, it's arguably Eugene O'Neill; who was the last great Irish American painter, novelist, maybe Scott Fitzgerald. In other words where is the Irish American cultural voice that needs to grow and develop and flourish?

"Because, if it doesn't, the danger is that we become a repository here for what's happening over there. And culture in Ireland is changing unselfconsciously. People are coming in from all over Europe and they will change the nature of what Irish culture is now."

What's happening in Irish America now, added Byrne, is being dictated by a new kind of immigrant.

"In the last century, the immigrants who came in on ships brought with them their oral history and memories of Ireland. The new immigrant is a guy who can fly home on Friday for the weekend. The nature of immigration has changed the nature of culture. We no longer bring those stories of home, immigration songs and all that stuff. We now have people who come over here to work professionally, who can fly home if they want to. Most of the people who are not undocumented are free to come and go.

"So the question I asked myself was, who are we, and what are we headed towards as a culture? What is representative of us in terms of art, what is our real connection to the island of Ireland where people are getting on with their business? They are not really thinking about what Irish Americans are up to, not really. And Irish Americans are saying, as long as we keep having Conor McPherson, or Martin McDonagh, as long as we keep being represented on Broadway, we're still culturally in the game."

Byrne is at odds with this view and it is from such a standpoint that he began advocating for a center that would be on an entirely different scale and scope to any in existence.

"We started to talk about building a new center that would encourage not just the importation of current Irish culture, and diverse current Irish culture, but would encourage the development of a unique Irish American cultural voice, this while we would have the place to do it which is also a business center, where people from Ireland could come in and do business, where Irish people could get together socially.

"That's the original concept I was working towards when I met with people from the arts center, the Irish rep. (Repertory Theatre) and politicians."

Byrne was asked by then taoiseach Bertie Ahern and arts minister John O'Donoghue four years ago to chair an exploratory committee, one that included business people.

"There has to a business perspective," he stressed.

"I reported back to them and now I'm reporting to (Taoiseach) Brian Cowen. Things have moved forward a lot. New York City has given the Irish Arts Center the equivalent of $12 million of a building in Hell's Kitchen. New York State and the city are completely behind it. Mayor Bloomberg, (City Council Speaker) Christine Quinn and Cowen are completely behind it."

On this ground, Byrne has a vision of a center that would bring all manner of disparate groups under one roof. That's the good vision. He also has a darker one.

"I feel that If you don't have this marriage of business and culture, and you don't have a separate Irish American cultural voice developing, Irish culture will die. There's only two things culture can do, it either changes or it dies. And Irish culture, in the broadest sense, is dying."

Byrne is currently updating the Irish government with details of what he said is a very definite plan of action and a particularly limited timeframe.

"Of course it's a sensitive time economically to be asking for money," he said. "But this is the best time to invest, not just in this notion of an Irish identity and culture, but in the brand of Ireland.

"It just needs a commitment from the Irish government to support this. The government are behind it, in theory. It just needs that final push to make it happen. You really have to envision it as a temple on the hill. We would have to make a place of welcome, not just for Irish Americans. It would reach out to all cultures, a place of light and welcome."