On one hand he's the quintessential civil servant - diplomatic, careful about facts, frequently "off the record", sometimes deferential. On the other, he speaks like a modern, commercial manager and believes in implementing change in the latest consultative manner.
Mr John O'Connor, the chief executive of the Central Fisheries Board, was indeed a career civil servant until 1997, when he took over the statutory body that controls the seven regional fisheries boards, and has responsibility for the State's 200plus lakes covering around 145,000 hectares and 13,800 kilometres of main channel rivers. Its ambit also includes regulating angling, commercial fishing, restocking, pollution control and fish farming, as well as sea angling up to the 12-mile territorial zone.
"If you compare us with sea fisheries, where they are trying to consolidate what they have, have problems with stocks, an old fleet, control at EU level - we haven't started yet with angling. "Here is an industry that is underdeveloped. There are fantastic opportunities to develop the product, there's a lot of work to be done on the environmental side and great opportunities to enhance the fisheries, which in turn will enhance the lives of local communities through supplementing their incomes," he points out.
In 1999, the Central Fisheries Board completed a £19 million (€24 million) plan to develop tourism angling, which is worth £90 million annually. The target was to increase overseas visitor numbers by 7 per cent annually over those years, to increase domestic participation by 5 per cent and increase expenditure per angler by 2.5 per cent over the same period, all of which has been achieved.
It was the biggest single investment in inland fisheries in the Republic and in Europe, Mr O'Connor says. It provided 2,250 game "spaces" - places to fish - for salmon and trout, and 1,850 coarse fishing spaces (pike, tench and roach); saw the development of 800 kilometres of river channels; the survey of 220 lakes and rivers; and the improvement of the aquatic habitat over a further 370 kilometres of waterways. It also allowed for the recruitment of 20 graduates for fisheries research, the investigation of title to 3,100 kilometres of river channels and 2,000 hectares of lakes with 15 specially trained staff, and for increasing salmon populations in rehabilitated rivers and streams.
Overlapping this plan and continuing until 2006 is a £24 million development initiative under the National Development Plan, drawing down EU structural funds. "The £24 million is only the beginning of the investment in inland fisheries under the national plan. We will be looking at securing funding for other areas, particularly in the environment area," he says.
Yet Mr O'Connor operates with a top management team of just five people. "My philosophy is, we give the responsibility to the people. I support them, but I want to know what's happening. I want the fisheries boards to be the best. "I want us to be an example in terms of management capability and delivering a service. The challenge is all the greater because you have to bring eight boards along. The achievement is all the greater if you can get that."
To achieve his targets, Mr O'Connor works hard and travels a lot, the work ethic coming from his mother, Peg, who at 85 is still running the family grocery shop in Ardouchter between Ballyheigue and Ballybunion in Co Kerry. And she reared 10 children at the same time. "Mother would be an exceptionally good businesswoman. To this day, there is nobody in the family who can touch her. She worked extremely hard - the shop opened from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. and only closed on Christmas Day," he recalls.
The business gene obviously was passed on to her son. In his time in the Department of the Marine, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he managed to secure then unheard of EU funding. "Everywhere I went, I have tried to move things on. I associate two things with my time there. I headed the Irish delegation dealing with a fisheries surveillance programme, where we got £33 million initially for two Casa aircraft for the Air Corps. It was the first injection of capital into fisheries protection. "And I was very much involved in white fishing, to give additional licences for large white fish for trawlers to exploit unexploited stocks. That was at a time when there was an EU moratorium on development." In 1992, when the Exchequer grant to inland fisheries had been reduced, he managed to get £10 million in EU funding for processing on the sea fisheries side, working in partnership with Mr Sean O'Donoghue, then in the Department of the Marine and now chief executive of the Killybegs Fishermen's Organisation. "He was great at getting money," Mr O'Connor says; others have said the same about Mr O'Connor.
Around this time, he was appointed a board member of the Central Fisheries Board and a Foyle Fisheries commissioner. And his wife Eilis also was a commissioner. She's an assistant principal in the Department. He explains how they met: "In 1979, she came into the Department and sat beside me." But life was not to be a bed of roses. " We married in 1981 and within nine months, I had chronic kidney failure. I was three years on a kidney machine, five hours a night in Jervis Street after work. My sister gave me a kidney and, after 15 years, I've never looked back." But the medication he has had to take led to other complications and he has had two hip replacements and a disc removed from his back.
But he's still a dab hand at the DIY - when he extended his house in Leixlip, Co Kildare, he did most of the work. And, fittingly, he's an enthusiastic angler, a sport shared with his children Eoin (18), Ellen (15) and Niall (8). His other great interest is Irish literature, especially poetry - Sean O Riordain and Mairtin O Direain are his favourites. (He had almost completed a degree in Irish, maths and economics when the kidney problem occurred.) And then there's theatre, sport and even cooking. This probably could be attributed to his boarding school Redemptorist education in Limerick, where the emphasis was not on exams but on giving students a rounded education, to make them fit for the Redemptorist missions. But he says of that conservative and strict upbringing: "I came from the button accordion society and was introduced to Tchaikovsky."
Mr O'Connor says there are two main functions he wants to have completed before his five-year contract with the board ends in 2002. These are organisational - a change management strategy - and sectoral - the development of the fisheries. Change management was the biggest issue to be tackled. "It's about modernising the fisheries service. It's about training and developing people, introducing new and improved systems, and partnership with staff in the Central Fisheries Board and colleagues in the regions. "The structure we have is repeated nowhere within the public service. I see a business plan as being essential, especially for the non-commercial State sector. We have a training programme for the first time for all ports. You must train people, especially for bringing in change," he says.
On the sectoral side, catchment management was introduced for the first time and local communities were brought in to manage their own resources. This covers the environment, the management of fish, who takes the fish, local farmers and local authorities. In some areas, this has been quite successful; in others they still have difficulties, he reports. "My job is to give national leadership on this."
