To catch a few moments with Sue Storey is quite a coup. As a Managing Director with CIBC World Markets, it is not uncommon for the native of Dublin's Rathfarnham neighbourhood to put in long days at her Bay Street office. And her charity and fundraising schedule alone would be one that would keep another less-driven person busy for the whole day.

Storey can feel it too as we settle in at a conference room at BCE Place at Bay and Front Streets, overlooking the downtown core, this past November. She has been looking forward to this "treat of tea," for a while, as it is hard for her to find the few minutes it takes to make a cup while she is on the trading floor. It's not hard to see why; during our interview, she was paged on the conference room intercom and was tracked down by her extremely capable assistant, Luisa Campoli.

Storey is not just a woman in demand at work, but in her charity activities as well, as she brings with her a unique work-ethic and extensive connections that are proving beneficial to the Irish community here and in Ireland in her new role as the national chairperson of the Ireland Fund of Canada. The Fund has chapters here in Toronto, Edmonton and Ottawa. But she did not come by her work habits or empathy for the less-well-to-do easily by some condescending rich-person guilt or for self-aggrandizement.  She earned it from working her way up and from her modest Dublin background, growing up with five sisters and two brothers. She graduated from high school at the age of 16, and spent a year in Europe, teaching English and working as an au pair.

Unlike many other people in her high school, Loreto, Storey went on to pursue her post-secondary studies. "I was a poor, impoverished 70s teenager. I'm your basic scraper," she says. "So, I was your basic hard-luck story."

She attended University College Dublin where she did a double major in Geography and Greek and Roman studies. But like many people of her generation, she had to work in order to pay for school. She got a job with the Bank of Ireland on Baggot Street at the age of 18, working on international banking.  "We went to university at night because of the enlightened education policy of the bank."

In 1982, "I got my papers." Storey followed one of her sisters over to Canada, though "my parents were just devastated when I went." Her sister sponsored her application, as "It was hard to get into Canada." Storey began studying Geography at York University before switching her major to business at York's Atkinson College.

Just as in Dublin, "I had to finance myself, so I went to Bay Street."  Once again, at the age of 22, eight months after arriving from Ireland, she was hired on by the Wood Gundy investment banking firm, which was bought out by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in the late 1980s, following the stock market crash of 1987. She says that she has been fortunate to have once again bucked societal norms and been with the same company for as long as she has been.

Storey has been involved with the Ireland Fund of Canada for the past five years. She was vice chair for two years and, while her ascension to the chair of the committee this past December was not a fait accompli, "no one person decides if you are to be the Chair...it's a decision by the members of the Board. I guess the board felt I could deliver." She certainly hopes to be able to deliver as well. While Storey expressed her desire to continue on with such Fund favourites as the St. Patrick's Day Luncheon, the Ireland Fund Day at the Races and the Emerald Ball, she also wants to improve and expand certain programs that the Fund covers. One of the Fund's newest and most successful initiatives has been the annual Bring-A-Kid-To-Camp campaign.

"The way we raise money has changed substantially in the past few years," she says. "Our basic job is to make the Ireland Fund relevant to our donors. We really encourage people to throw their support around their passions."

As for the kid's camp initiative, Storey whishes to expand its scope. "It's about bringing that uniquely Canadian perspective of tolerance and putting that into a leadership forum...those kids are community leaders," she explains. She doesn't want to just bring more kids over to spend a few weeks at a camp in the Muskokas - nice though that would be - but to also be "following up with these kids as they grow older." Another challenge the Fund faces is how to continue to square the image of the newly affluent, Celtic Tiger Ireland, with the continuing poverty that affects many areas. "Like all countries which have explosive growth, there are still underlying, segregated areas of poverty," she says. That is why, for the Ireland Fund, integrated schooling in Northern Ireland, and Belfast in particular, is such a priority.