Robert_Charlton - 6:53 am on Mar 28, 2008 (gmt 0)

I didn't remember ever seeing an .ie TLD page ranking in Google US on general subjects, so I did some Ireland-related searches for the kinds of sites that might logically originate in Ireland, and a few .ie domains did show up, but not nearly as many as one would expect.

I'd try getting links from US-hosted sites before I'd change the TLD. Changing domains would cost you a chunk of time and then some.