THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: KATHY SHERIDANtalks to Alan Dukes

AFTER THE ENCOUNTER with Queen Maeve’s massive calves and perky bosom rearing from the foliage outside Connaught House on Burlington Road, everything else about Anglo Irish Bank’s latest group headquarters is bound to be a let-down. Sure, there’s a dedicated lift to the fifth floor and good coffee served in nice cups, but it’s hardly plush. Deliberately so, no doubt. Alan Dukes, the bank’s chairman, notes, unprompted, that it’s a sandwich-only menu after board meetings nowadays. “That’s a moan” from someone who after every election swears he’ll never eat another sandwich, he says.

The scary/lovely-girl theme continues into his office, where a Graham Knuttel Rose of Tralee glowers out of a canvas, across from a dark, moody abstract and a boats-on-water nod to tradition. There is no way to read a man with the pick of a bank’s art collection who comes up with this melange.

He finds them relaxing, he says. But he reckons they should be shared around. “Mike [Aynsley, the bank’s chief executive] got the idea that when things settle down we should tour parts of the collection around some of the smaller galleries in the country. It would cost a bit of money, and you’d have people shouting out there, but there are plenty of small galleries that could do with a fillip, and if they got it free . . .”

This is no sudden, superficial outreach to the arts brigade. Dukes’s main interests include classical and baroque music, and both his daughters studied music at third level (although economic realities mean one is now working in IT for a London bank and the other is studying veterinary nursing at UCD). Then again, he also gets a kick out of motor racing at Mondello and hacking a horse around Castledermot, which earned him a fractured collarbone and ribs last winter.

This is not one of the better days at the bank. It's Tuesday, the day before the Government made a decision on Anglo's restructuring proposal, a good bank-bad bank split. Brian Lenihan is just back from Brussels, probably after a screeching U-turn on the proposal that Dukes has promoted with missionary zeal. Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank is saying that Anglo is Ireland's baby alone. Fintan O'Toole's column in The Irish Timesis making a trenchant case for dropping the cléof Anglo's porteinto Trichet's lap with a cheery " c'est votre bébé, actuellement".

The column clipping is offered to the chairman for his perusal.

“Prepare to puke,” he tells himself. “I really get worried when I agree with Fintan – which I do sometimes.” It’s all said in genial tones.

But has he heard the massed media accusations against him – Dukes – of arrogance bordering on dismissiveness? “That’s terrible. And journalists can be such delicate, gentle souls,” he says, dripping mock empathy. “I don’t think I’m arrogant, no. Anyone who says I’m arrogant is a fool,” he adds with a knowing grin. But seriously? ”I don’t suffer fools gladly, I suppose.”

On the other hand he can be a monument to languid charm – or, as he puts it himself, “a very nice kind of person”. After all, he managed to charm the Kildare electorate for 21 years. He was spotted in Tullamore in recent weeks judging a televised young-farmer competition, puffing away on his cigarettes in the longueurs, making himself amiable and available for chats with members of the public – who, he says, tend to remember him mostly for the Tallaght Strategy. This refers to his extraordinarily brave decision, in 1987, as Fine Gael leader (after perilously limited consultation) to support a minority Fianna Fáil government in its drastic measures to balance the books. “That’s 23 years ago, and it has seemed to remain in the public mind as something remarkable.”

His general sangfroid and indifference to other people’s opinions – in particular, anything Fine Gael has to say about Anglo Irish Bank or Nama policy – also remain fairly remarkable by Irish standards.

How to explain this insouciance? He dismisses my theory that having an English paternal grandfather – Albert Dukes from South Shields – left him relatively free of the classic Irish please-like-me baggage. Bert, “very thin, straight, rather severe”, was a British army sapper laying telephone lines in Ireland when he met and married Ann Allen from Cobh and was in Gallipoli when Alan’s father, James, was born.

His determination to preserve the bank has triggered suggestions that the famously independent-minded, straight-talking 65-year-old has gone native, subsumed into the bank culture of entitlement and salary hikes.

“I’ve gone native as an Irish person, concerned about Ireland. And that’s the concern. I’ve said this and I mean it: if we had found an option that would have been cheaper for the taxpayer, we would have proposed that.” The salary hikes came about, he says, because there is still a thriving market for certain types of bank expertise and Anglo was losing highly qualified people to other banks.

He has also been accused of rabidly running with the Government line on Anglo. In which case his devotion has hardly been reciprocated, as he points out himself. “I’m actually upset at the moment that the Government hasn’t taken my line on this as rabidly as I’d want it to.”

The “only agenda” always, he says, was to take the bank out of the mire in some way and – in a recurring mantra of his – “at the least cost to the taxpayer . . . Now, that’s been overtaken by an entirely political feeling – the anger – that we have to get rid of this thing quickly. People have a vague idea that the quicker you do it the more expensive it’s going to be. So they want it wound down over a long period – except for Dan fuckin’ Boyle, who specified a short period”.

His frustration with the Government’s anticipated cave-in and the populists is almost palpable. It’s probably as close to manifest irritation as he gets. Would he be very annoyed if another course of action was taken? “I’d be disappointed, yeah,” he says definitively. “The mission that I have is to find a way through this god-awful mess at the least cost to the taxpayer, and we put a lot of work into it. Other people don’t credit that. Joan Burton has this wonderful capacity of suggesting that she’s the only one that has a conscience about the taxpayer, that she has a special corner on this – and she says that blithely, in utter ignorance of what she’s talking about.”

The day after this conversation the Government rejected Anglo management’s proposal in favour of an unanticipated third way, a move perceived as a humiliating slap-down to a Fine Gaeler who had unflinchingly run the Government line. By the time we talk again he is rueful rather than angry, consoling himself with the thought that “it wasn’t even entirely an Irish decision . . . The way I look at it is the European Commission and the shareholders have decided. And the shareholder is sovereign”.

The main difficulty for him surely is that after months of Anglo insistence that its way would be the least costly, the Government is claiming that its way will be. “That’s because the European Commission doesn’t agree with our view on how the ‘good’ bank would perform. I wouldn’t die in the ditch for what we put up because there are areas of judgment in it.”

Was he tempted to throw his hat at Queen Maeve and flounce out when he heard the news? “No. I’m too arrogant in some ways, too stubborn in others to do that. This might sound very arrogant, but I’m probably my own most severe critic. I constantly re-examine what I’ve done. Yes, I’m asking myself was there more I could have done.” And was there? “Oh,” he says politely, “that’s my business.”

In any event, none of this should have taken so long, he says. But he’s met delay and scepticism, he implies, from the beginning and in the highest echelons. “I’ll probably hang people for saying this,” he says, but when he and Donal O’Connor dropped in on the Department of Finance in April 2009 to break the news that Anglo’s losses were far in excess of €4.5 billion, “their first reaction was to look at us askance . . . You could see what they were thinking, These guys are exaggerating the losses they’ve made so they’ll get a good chunk of recapitalisation and they’ll be comfortable. They said, ‘Oh, we need to check that.’ ” That took time. Meanwhile, the market continued to fall off a cliff.

Is he shocked by the confederacy of dunces that got us here?  “It’s appalling. It’s absolutely appalling . . . But that’s the background – just get on and deal with it.” And forget the past? “Not really . . . I’m still uncovering what the problem was in the past. It doesn’t do us any good in what I’m doing, to be indignant about it. Yes, they were absolutely, utterly mad in what they did. All the banks did it. You hear people saying that AIB and Bank of Ireland had to follow because they couldn’t let Anglo eat their lunch. The fact that somebody else is doing something crassly stupid doesn’t mean you’re obliged to do the same thing.”

A soupcon of rage from him would be gratifying, though. Any chance? “That’s not me. Olivia O’Leary once remarked about me that when a crisis happens, ‘Dukes flies into a terrible calm’.” So the perpetrators roam free and we are doomed to repeat the madness? “That’s a problem, yeah. History teaches us how to make the same mistakes again.” Suddenly, his voice sharpens. “But here’s where the rage comes in. I think that more of that should have been seen when it was happening. The rage that I have is a very intellectual kind of rage, I’m not your average . . .” He tails off with that inscrutably boyish grin.

"I looked at Freefallthe other night – it's crap television, with loads of moody shots of cars and tunnels, speeded up and slowed down . . . They spent a lot of time talking about light-touch regulation and how this had screwed up the whole world. I'm not at all convinced about that. I don't actually think there was much wrong with light-touch regulation in the concept; it just wasn't implemented . . .

“By the time I got here Anglo had broken every conceivable prudential limit for concentration by sectors, concentration by borrowers . . . And all of that was reported to the regulator, by all the banks, in mind-blowing detail. The regulators should have seen the whole goddamn banking sector was too heavily engaged. And what did they do? Absolutely shag all.”

And so it continues, he says, “this disease in our economic thinking, that construction is good for the economy. In fact, the economy is good for construction. I remember John Bruton getting castigated for criticising the Irish psyche for being far too concerned with bricks and mortar. He said we should be investing more in companies, putting money in the stock market. Now of course he, being John Bruton, had some very refined theoretical ideas about how to do it, which were utterly unworkable. But the idea was good”.

He accepts that the public require heads on sticks as a vent for anger. “The desire for retribution is a perfectly normal human reaction . . . But it hasn’t got much to do with the law.” From which we may infer that he anticipates no banker perp walks. Does he see individual developers suffering? “I don’t know any of them personally.” Really? “No, that’s wrong, I do know some of them personally. And I do know it’s very clear that their net worth has gone down the Swanee.”

But hadn’t some of them assembled trust funds and some charming little Spanish and Portuguese properties in which to lick their wounds? “A lot of the sensible ones would have set up something like that. It becomes a question of how you arrange your affairs so that you can insulate a part of it from the world around you. And that’s what limited liability is all about . . . Builders have been doing it for years.” Does that feel right to him? “That’s the way we have chosen to regulate these things. It’s part of the enterprise culture. I can’t really see anything morally hugely wrong about somebody who makes a profit on a development and puts that away in a legally insulated use or place and then goes on to do more developments – and even if he loses there you can’t get at the legally insulated one.” A recipe for reckless behaviour, though? “Yeah. And we shouldn’t let them.”

HE BELIEVES PEOPLE can learn from their mistakes. Asked about the appropriateness of appointing a former AIB banker to the Anglo board – Gary Kennedy, who had left AIB after what Dukes calls “a bit of a heave” – Dukes points out that there wasn’t “a huge cohort rushing to be directors of Anglo Irish Bank. And I thought, okay, here’s a guy who knows something about banking . . . And, unlike some, I do believe that people can learn from what’s happened to them.”

The question about Dukes himself is why he chose to take on this job. He hardly needed the excitement. After all, he was minister for finance at another traumatic time for the State, when AIB had to be rescued from the ICI insurance fiasco. He concedes that this gives him a certain empathy with Brian Lenihan. “I have some understanding of that. And I think he’s handling it extremely well. And that’s not a popular thing to say in Fine Gael either. But I would moderate the effect of that by saying that Lenihan seems to me to be about the only asset the Government has. And he won’t thank me for saying that either.”

When the electorate bounced him out of the Dáil in 2002, in the great FG meltdown, he was head-hunted by the Institute of European Affairs and, soon after, by Mary Finan of Wilson Hartnell Public Relations (WHPR), offering a part-time job. He took both.

His integrity had never been in doubt, although the fact that he remains a director of WHPR, a company that also handles the Quinn Group – a major Anglo debtor –  has raised eyebrows. “I have no apologies to make for that. None . . . I have never done any work on anything connected with the Quinn accounts in Wilson Hartnell.” So we must rely on his and WHPR’s version of Chinese walls? “No. You’re just relying on my concept of what is right and what is wrong. And I’m quite comfortable with that.”

Apart from his WHPR stipend he also gets a ministerial pension of about €100,000. So despite the jibes about the money from the Anglo job – €150,000 since the reduction – he hardly needed it for a lifestyle that appears to be pretty modest and low-key. So why did he take the job? “I thought it was a worthwhile thing to do. In a professional career dating back over 40 years I’ve never found a way of staying out of trouble.”

But supposing that, in 10 years’ time, all that people remember is that he presided over hikes and went native? “That’s not what they will be saying. A lot of people underestimate what level of common sense remains with the Irish public . . . If, at the end of the day, we find a way to minimise the cost, I’ll be happy. We’ll have given it our best shot.”

CV A life in politics

BORNDrimnagh, Dublin, 1945

EDUCATEDEconomics and politics at UCD

FAMILYMarried to Fionnuala; two daughters, Louise and Gwen

CAREER1969 Goes to work as an economist for the National Farmers' Association [now the IFA], then joins commissioner Dick Burke's cabinet in Brussels

1981Wins Dáil seat for Fine Gael in Kildare; appointed minister for agriculture on his first day

1982Appointed minister for finance

1986Appointed minister for justice

1987Elected leader of Fine Gael; announces the Tallaght Strategy

1990Fine Gael humiliated in presidential election; Dukes loses leadership to John Bruton

1996Appointed minister for transport, energy and communications to replace Michael Lowry

2002Loses his seat after 21 years in the Dáil

2003Becomes director-general of the Institute of European Affairs and director of Wilson Hartnell PR

2008Appointed public interest director of Anglo Irish Bank

2010Appointed chairman of the bank