Interview: The announcement that AIB will start looking for his successor later this year should not be interpreted as a sign that Mr Michael Buckley will be bowing out early, according to the ill-starred chief executive.
"I don't see myself on any sort of glide path... you can talk to anybody around here and I am giving it the full monty and will continue to do so right up until my retirement date," he said. And that will be February 2006, just in case there is any doubt, he added.
Bowing to pressure for him to go in the wake of the latest crisis to engulf the bank would not be the right thing to do, said Mr Buckley.
"The way I look at these things is that, when something significant goes wrong, the first thing a chief executive has to do is look to his board and say 'Do you or do you not still have confidence in me?' That is the only direction in which the chief executive should look," he said.
Although he did not formally tender his resignation over the bank's current troubles, Mr Buckley said his actions amounted to the same thing.
"I went \ I spoke to our chairman. I said: 'This is a very significant issue. I am accountable for it. I need to talk to you about whether you want me to continue on in this job.' We talked about it. And I reflected and he reflected. He said he wanted me to continue and he consulted the board about it. That's how it happened and that - I would say - is the right way these things should happen," he said.
Mr Buckley acknowledged that, as chief executive, he is accountable for what went wrong and also for the cultural failings at AIB which contributed to the problem, but not, he argued, to the extent that some have suggested. An independent analysis by consultants Concours group found no evidence of a corrupt or broken organisation, he said.
"There is not a culture of overcharging, let alone a culture of corruption," said Mr Buckley.
The flaws in the way the bank functions are in many ways the flipside of what makes it a good organisation, he argued. There is a strong sense of camaraderie that is to be expected from an organisation where people work for long periods. There is also a "can-do" attitude focused on yearly performance targets.
"It is very clear and it didn't need research to confirm it... In an organisation where people tend to work together for quite long periods, getting absolutely clean and honest communication all the time can be a problem," said Mr Buckley.
"The other thing you need to watch out for when you have a can-do attitude is that you also put an emphasis on learning from mistakes. If you don't, it can lead to a situation where people are reluctant to admit mistakes in the first instance," he said.
The consultants' findings are not, Mr Buckley conceded, very different from the picture painted of AIB in recent weeks as an institution where people are afraid to flag problems to their superiors. "It's by no means black and white. A lot of things do get escalated, but obviously some things, and some really important things like the foreign exchange charges, don't get escalated," he said.
"If you boil the whole culture thing down - to what I am focused on at the moment in a big way - it's doing what we can to make people know it is safe to speak your mind and if you don't speak your mind on something that is concerning you that is a bad thing," said Mr Buckley.
Signs that all was not well with the internal functioning of AIB were apparent from early in Mr Buckley's tenure at the top. Firstly there was the DIRT inquiry and more recently the fraud at its US subsidiary Allfirst which cost it over €750 million.
"What I am accountable for is that I probably felt - maybe somewhat naively - that in resetting the strategy and the way we were addressing our marketplaces the culture would follow," he said.
"In retrospect, I should probably have done more in terms of practices... to encourage speaking up but its not just about whistleblowing arrangements. Its deeper than that."
The process of addressing the structural failing exposed by the latest revelations will not be complete until the investigation into overcharging is over, which is unlikely to be before the autumn.
"It will allow us to move on to the next step of seeing where does the responsibility lie, where is the culpability. I am absolutely pawing at the ground, but I am also aware this is a due process issue," he said.
It is also likely to be the autumn before the results of IFSRA's investigation into various issues at AIB Investment Managers (AIBIM) will be made public. The most serious of which is that former executives of the bank used an offshore vehicle called Faldor, which was managed by AIBIM to evade tax.
"That's what Faldor was about. But what was established from the investigation we put into the public domain was that there are no other Faldors about," he said.
Mr Buckley was also keen to point out that the executives involved in Faldor have left the bank and that, in his position as head of AIB's capital markets division at the time, he had no knowledge of Faldor.
But yesterday was all about damage limitation and one part of AIB's carefully choreographed response appeared to be backfiring yesterday afternoon. The bank's highlighting the fact it was refunding foreign exchange customers as an act of good faith rather than law, had left them open to accusations of arrogance.
"I hope not and I would apologise if that is the way it came across," said Mr Buckley. "We were accused of ripping off our customers. Now, ripping off your customers to me means robbing our customers and robbing our customers means charging them more than they could have got elsewhere. That is my way of looking at things," he said.
AIB's charges may not have been those they had regulatory approval for but they were competitive, explained Mr Buckley.
"This is the thing that drives me bananas. We are just trying to say to our customers you were not ripped off."
