Limerick native Tom Prendergast went from illegal alien in New York to record producer

Tom Prendergast headed for the States 30 years ago without much of a plan. Before long he’d opened a music store and started his own label, he tells Michael Moynihan

It was thirty years ago that Tom Prendergast set up a record company in America.

A different time. Ireland in the eighties could be a grim place, and Limerick native Prendergast had lit out for the territory early in the decade: “I was 27, not up to much. I had two friends out in the States, one of them came back and said he’d pay for my flight out, so I said, ‘why not’.” Prendergast settled in Hoboken (“Home of Frank Sinatra”) and could look across the river to Manhattan, but it wasn’t all plain sailing.