The banks might come under a bit of pressure next year when a large chunk of their forex earnings disappear as a result of the arrival of the euro. But there is every indication that the corporate finance arms of the banks will have a bumper 1999 with corporate activity likely to accelerate for a variety of reasons.

Apart from the Telecom flotation which will generate extremely fat fees for the Government's advisers, Merrill Lynch and AIB, and Telecom's advisers ABN Amro and Rothschild, the likely flotation of C&C has apparently had most of Ireland's finest in the corporate finance business knocking on the company's door out in Ballyfermot ever since The Irish Times reported a year ago that Guinness would be forced to sell its stake.

Irish Life and Irish Permanent - a £1.5 billion marriage - already have DLJ Phoenix and Rothschild crunching the numbers for them. Unfortunately for the Irish corporate financiers, this "merger" has not brought anything in the area of fat fees with virtually every Irish corporate finance house having a parent bank which competes head on with both Irish Life and Irish Permanent.

Add in the likely TSB/ACC merger, the Jurys/Doyle merger, the Cablelink sale and possible privatisations of the likes of Bord Gais and Aer Rianta and you get some indication of the amount of business or potential business out there for the corporate finance community.

But it isn't just the mega-deals that can generate lots of money for the corporate finance houses. Smaller flotations, management buy-outs and buy-ins, venture capital investments and trade sales all generate fees and the likelihood is that there will be a surge in this sort of activity over the next year.

With stock markets having rebounded strongly, flotation will probably be back on the agenda for many companies which either pulled their own flotations - such as Parc, Flexicom and Grafton Recruitment - or put the whole process on hold until they saw which way the markets were going to move. The high-growth high-risk technology companies are likely to find favour - either on DCM/AIM or Nasdaq - producing a steady flow of fee income for the corporate financiers. But many of the poorly performing companies already on the markets are also likely to follow the lead of Fitzwilton and Jones and de-list. Investors will likely show an increasing disinclination to put money into these sort of companies in the post-euro investment scenario.

Last year there were some very sizeable trade sales of Irish companies to home and overseas buyers, with serious money paid for the likes of logistics group Walsh Western, hygiene company Connacht & Court and advertising agency Irish International. Private deals of that scale require serious corporate advice on both sides - and all that does not come cheap.

So the next time you hear a corporate financier whinge, ignore him.