Yah, Free Money For Bacon. Wanker…
Director of numerous Irish companies, including Ballymore Properties.
Dr. Bacon has recently been appointed as an adviser to NAMA; the National Asset Management Agency.
Conflict of interest much… they might as well appointed Seanie, Fingers n Ivor while they are at it…
NAMA’s prospects of making a profit have increased signficantly because of this news. Now, there is a very real prospect of NAMA putting Bacon on the…board.
irishtimes.com/newspaper/wee … 12930.html
In the eye of the Anglo storm
THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: KATHY SHERIDAN talks 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.…(cont’d)
