The King Arthur legend has continued to feature in Kieran Corrigan's film projects since he first advised director John Boorman on the funding of Excalibur in 1981.

On foot of the friendship which developed with Mr Boorman, they went on to establish Merlin Films Group, a film support and production company, and they are returning again to the Arthurian theme with a plan to produce an animated version of the round-table story which will inevitably bear comparison with Disney's The Sword in the Stone.

Indeed, the clock in Mr Corrigan's office would not look out of place among Merlin's possessions. A gift from his wife, the RTE presenter, Ingrid Miley, it describes the hours as "oneish", "twoish", "threeish", giving its owner an unfair reputation, he says, for being a slack timekeeper. "I try to be efficient because I do not like to be kept waiting myself," he says. Among his upcoming projects is a feature film of Ivanhoe, which will

be directed by Garvin Miller, and the first film version of Noel Coward's Hay Fever (director, Nicholas Roeg) which is due to go into production soon. Two completed productions, Angela Mooney and This is my Father will be screened later this year.

Meanwhile, The General, goes on release in the US in December. As executive producer, Mr Corrigan rejects the criticism that the film was somehow a whitewash of the real Martin Cahill story, pointing out that the criminal's vicious character was shown. In any case, it was a film, "not a documentary", he argues.

"The way forward is to make what sells. This is a film industry. That is the whole point of making movies. You have to make a movie that people want to buy and want to see and want to sell," he says. "The big thing" about that project is that, as a major release, it was all financed independently, he says. "We own the rights to The General. We borrowed the money to fund it, we got the script, we sold it to France, we sold it to the UK," he says. An essential part of retaining the film rights was the successful gap financing (borrowing from a bank on the basis of estimates of box office sales) and building on his reputation. "We now have lines of credit from a number of banks for `gaps'," he says.

Developing the distribution side of the business is essential to Merlin Group's plan to "build up a library of rights".

"The big problem is that in Ireland and Europe, dozens upon dozens of films are made and very few see the screen," he says. From Fintona, Co Tyrone, Kieran Corrigan (44) moved to Belfast with his family, settling in a predominantly Protestant area before the two religions became ghettoised. His father owned a number of Spar grocery stores but the family returned to Co Tyrone after the Troubles began and resulted in the boycotting of shops.

In the meantime he boarded at St Michael's College in Omeath, Co Louth. "The accents were really weird. I had never heard a Republic of Ireland accent until I came to Omeath," he says.

He went on to Trinity College where he studied economics and did an LLB in law at the same time, later qualifying as a barrister. But immediately after Trinity he trained as an accountant with Arthur Andersen because he "wanted to earn a salary". He was advised to study tax law and found that "`accountancy and law really blend tremendously well, especially for practising tax law".

He found attitudes in the Republic different to those in the North. There is "very definitely" a Protestant work ethic, he says, while the Republic's economic success is "almost as if it is happening and people do not realise it is happening". "What seems to be conclusive is that nobody knows what is happening at the moment. One of the things that has not been taken into account for the property boom is the tax amnesty of 1993," he says, remarking how it freed up about £10 billion in what had been "hot" funds.

He has been appointed to the IDA board for his general business profile, he says, rather than any particular expertise in the film industry. Along with his tax consultancy business, he is a lecturer in tax law in Trinity College and is secretary of the university's Irish Centre for European Law (ICEL). He is due to have a text book on revenue law published in the autumn. Over the years he has advised on property deals and is a former member of the Custom House Docks Development board and a former chairman of the National Building Agency, established as a consultancy firm on local authority housing projects and urban renewal. He also formerly chaired Powerscourt Developments which oversaw the refurbishment of the Co Wicklow house and the estate's development. Among other projects, Mr Corrigan is a director of and is promoting the Co Kildare-based biotechnology company, Edenland. Its US sister company, Hollis Eden, established to licence its product, is listed on the Nasdaq.

But he has gradually increased his profile in the film industry. He is a board member of the Film Institute of Ireland and of ART House, the Temple Bar multimedia centre in Dublin.

He is the director of operations of Alliance International Releasing, a Shannon-based film distribution company which is part of the Canadian film production company, Atlantic Alliance. Shannon, because of its 10 per cent corporate tax rate for international commodities trading, is also a base, through Merlin Films, for his dealings with Cinar, one of the biggest animation producers in the world. He is also director of Concorde Film Studios, after encouraging and assisting the legendary B-movie director Roger Corman to establish his European studios in Connemara, and is disappointed at much of the reaction to the establishment of Concorde Anois Teo.

Roger Corman, he says, is "a different ball of wax", who gives all-year round work to film industry novices who see the whole production process. "It is a different kind of production process, a different kind of business enterprise. I think there is a lot of misrepresentation," he says. He cites Corman's Mask of the Red Death as one of his favourite B-movies, but picks One flew over the cuckoo's nest, as his favourite film.

He has found the film industry "an intriguing one, completely different to constructing a building.

"The bits that go together are intriguing and it is also, potentially, a very valuable industry internationally.

"It is a massive industry if you can actually succeed in getting the formula right and getting them funded, and getting the structures right," he says.

Under the Section 35 finance scheme he has helped raised $60 million (£42.3 million) in Ireland, but he is not worried about the introduction of similar tax breaks for the film industry in Britain, saying that an important difference is that companies there must wait for the film to be produced before claiming their tax relief, whereas in Ireland, companies can claim while in production.

"You can never be certain that you will qualify if you finish shooting, you can never be sure that you will finish shooting. To raise money under the British system is very difficult," he says.

He also maintains that the Irish have established a reputation for excellence "in terms of competence of crews and skills of people".