Senior banker Tiarnan O'Mahony talks to Arthur Beesley about his aspirations for his bank and the sector as a whole

Like many senior bankers, Mr Tiarnan O'Mahony is alive to the paradox. The industry has suffered the ignominies of the AllFirst and DIRT scandals but business is good.

Recently appointed chief operations officer at Anglo Irish Bank, the fast-growing darling of the sector, Mr O'Mahony is seen as one of those in the race to succeed Mr Sean Fitzpatrick as chief executive. But he dismisses suggestions that the succession will be decided any time soon.

"The bank isn't looking at that because we don't see the issue arising for quite some time to come. Does a chief operations officer become a chief executive? Very often he does - and very often he does not."

Other contenders for the top job are believed to include Mr Tom Browne, Anglo's head of wealth management, although Mr O'Mahony says the "situation doesn't arise as we stand today". He adds: "We put a new chairman in place in January - Peter Murray. That's really something that's done and dusted for quite some time to come. . . You're not going to do that for six months or you'd look very stupid. You have to do things with a realistic timeframe."

Aged 43, Mr O'Mahony has been with Anglo for 17 years. The bank had a staff of 50 when he joined. It now employs 900.

Anglo is something of a teacher's pet when it comes to delivering growth. According to analysts at Commerzbank, its share price growth was the second-best performing banking stock in Europe in the year to March. The bank's shares changed hands this week at €5.45, well ahead of the €3.50 to €3.75 range traded last year.

With no branch network, Anglo is a niche player whose core commercial mortgage business is complemented with private banking and treasury operations. Like its bigger peers, it has been a major beneficiary of the domestic boom. Yet with the expansion easing, Mr O'Mahony knows the days of double-digit national growth are over.

This means weaker growth for Anglo. "We certainly see it slowing to the region of earnings-per-share at 15 to 20 per cent as compared with 40 per cent last year and indeed the year before. We are going to have slower growth, but I'll take 15 to 20 per cent growth any day as a high-growth company into anyone's books."

Whatever Government emerges after the general election should continue with the policies followed in recent years, he says. "We're talking low taxes, we're talking incentive to drive business forward, making it attractive to employ people and also making it a pro-business environment."

Mr O'Mahony does not conceal his admiration for Ray MacSharry, the Fianna Fáil minister for finance when the economic turnaround began in the late 1980s. In addition, he acknowledges the role played by the then Fine Gael leader, Alan Dukes, in choosing not to block the turnaround strategy.

"They hold pride of place in Irish economic history," he says.

Indeed, Mr O'Mahony says he would have chosen a career in politics if he was "independently wealthy".

"Whether I would have been any good at it or not is a different matter."

Attempts made by Anglo two years ago to merge with First Active fizzled out and Mr O'Mahony says the bank has no potential acquisition on file at the moment.

Stating that Anglo wrote €3.2 billion in new business last year, Mr O'Mahony says that was greater than the entire ICC loan book when that bank was put on the market. "You don't have the hassle of negotiating and the premium to pay and all that. So acquisitions are not something that we absolutely have to have, they are something that if we get them that's fine.

"There are certain types of acquisitions which we would love to do which would contribute to the bottom line in a two- to three-year time horizon. If we could buy private banking assets in a location where we currently exist that would be very attractive. That means we're talking about Vienna, we're talking about Geneva, we're talking about the Isle of Man. If we could buy private banking assets there we'd love that."

Mr O'Mahony says Anglo has never received an approach to be bought out. "We've never had someone come in and sit down and say look we'd be interested in doing a deal here."

Still, he adds: "Going forward, if someone walks in off the street and says I want to give you €10 per share we at the Anglo board would look at that very seriously and we would not say we won't recommend it because we're trying to protect our jobs or because we simply want to keep the bank independent just for the stake of it."

Such a price would be significantly in excess of Anglo's current value and Mr O'Mahony suggests that Anglo would be more interesting to potential suitors if it wasn't trading at full steam.

"I don't think we'd get €10 or €12 because I think it would be hard to justify. Stranger things have happened mind you. . . The first bank that I'd love to buy is the under-performing one and they're typically the better acquisition if you like."

Mr O'Mahony says consolidation of Irish industry is inevitable. "The law of gravity will always pertain no matter what happens. The force of economics equally pertains. If you have an industry that's overbranched and overstaffed that will get slimmed down. How it happens is what's actually left open."

On suggestions by Bank of Ireland head Mr Michael Soden that it merge with AIB, Mr O'Mahony suggests Anglo would welcome such a departure. "If you had two banks of equal strength that can often provide you with the very best of competition. That can be far better than having 10 good banks. I think even if you merged AIB and Bank of Ireland if they're not giving the service, ultimately what you find is other banks coming through and perhaps specialist banks. If AIB and Bank of Ireland merged, you'd certainly find that being good news for Anglo Irish Bank."

Anglo was recently in the news, albeit for a different reason. Citing client confidentiality, Mr O'Mahony declined to comment on a letter of guarantee that Anglo provided for Kerry businessman Mr John Moriarty, who emerged as the controlling shareholder in Dublin Waterworld, the company that will run the national aquatic centre at Abbotstown. Mr Moriarty emerged as a "white knight" when guarantees from the backer of the original bidder, Waterworld UK failed to materialise. Rival bidders had been eliminated by that stage.

Content as Mr O'Mahony is with Anglo's performance, it is the deeper questions facing Irish banks that niggle him.

He says: "If you're talking about the reputation of banking in Ireland, it is certainly not where it should be. There's no other way of putting it, it is poor. It's an industry matter.

"I was just listening to the radio on the way in where there was a woman walking down the road and there was someone spitting at her basically because she was a nun. Now she probably had saved 10,000 lives and their souls as well, and done great work but, because she's a nun, she's a bête noir now. That is a fact of the banking industry and we can't get away from that."

Still, the focus on past failings smacks of hypocrisy in certain quarters. "What I mean by that is that there were things happened but which we all knew about and now we're throwing our hands up in horror and saying gosh, wasn't that terrible. . . If we're facing the reality that what was done was wrong, we've got to face the reality that it was allowed be done as well."

While banks can be an easy target and were not alone in their failures, he says the business has valid questions to answer. "The industry is going to have to face the fact that we really need to be better corporate citizens and that that is now part of our objective because I don't think that would have come anywhere in the list of objectives 20 years ago."