CurrentAccount: Bertie Ahern was unsparing in his attack on Irish Ferries over its controversial plan to make more than 540 staff redundant or take lower pay at the troubled carrier.

Not since he condemned the top bosses in Aer Lingus in the latter days of the Willie Walsh regime has Ahern attacked the management classes in any company.

But unusually venemous as this latest assault was, it may be a case of the Taoiseach shouting loudly because there is little else he can do.

The remarks went down well among his friends in Siptu, but there is no sign yet of capitulation on the part of Irish Ferries. Nor is capitulation expected. No company is going to go to the wall for the sake of social partnership.

For all of that, Irish Ferries has gone to great lengths to justify its actions as the last resort in the face of international competition.

Still, as is common in these cases, the pain is confined to the lower orders in the company. Despite falling profits and sales last year, top managers enjoyed big increases in pay.

Managing director Eamonn Rothwell received €687,000, up from from €652,000 in 2003; finance director Gearóid O'Dea received €321,000, up from €283,000; and marketing director Tony Kelly received €244,000, up from €224,000. These sums included performance pay totalling €366,000, some €244,000 of which went to Mr Rothwell.

With unions in the company on the brink of strike action, Mr Rothwell's performance will be tested to its limits in the coming days.

Regulator publishes incomparable survey

Surveys appear to have become a central element of the consumer service provided by the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority. Published on a range of financial services at regular intervals, they aim to show how much consumers can save by shopping around.

What they don't show, for some strange reason, is how various providers have fared since the last time they were surveyed.

So, while this week's personal lending survey assesses savings on loans of €3,500, €7,000 and €13,500 over periods of one, three and five years, respectively, the previous survey addressed savings on loans of €2,000, €6,000 and €10,000 over the same time periods.

As a result, we know you can make savings of around €1,200 by shopping around on the basis of this survey's collection of examples compared to savings of around €800 on a totally different series of loans last time around.

What we don't know, however, is whether the cost of borrowing and the savings available on the examples used last time around has improved or worsened.

The reason for this approach might be that the regulator relies on the co-operation of the institutions for the timely and cost-efficient supply of information for the surveys. And the institutions are unlikely to have much interest in being judged on their progress, or lack of it, in providing customers with a genuinely competitive service.

Then again, an institution that has spent much of its short existence wrestling with what to call itself and the army of intermediaries it supervises probably just struggled to determine the most appropriate approach in this area too.

Breeders run to form

The fact that around one in five horses offered at Goffs' yearling sales this week went for more than €100,000 makes it pretty clear that fears about the impact of the Maktoum brothers' reported boycott of horses sired by Coolmore stallions were hyped.

Both Coolmore and the Maktoums are active buyers at the top end of the thoroughbred yearling markets in Europe and the US. And each operation tends to support the progeny of the stallions that they themselves own, although not to the exclusion of everything else.

But the experience of recent years indicates that nobody need have worried in the first place. The Racing Post pointed out during the week that neither operation has tended to splash out on the other's stock.

For instance, of 82 horses that Sheikh Mohammed bought in the US between 2003 and 2004, only 13 were by Coolmore stallions. That pattern has been repeated in other sales.

But business sense, not pique or wounded pride, tends to drive both groups' decisions. For instance, in 2004, the Maktoums' Godolphin racing operation acquired a horse called Shamardal, after he had proved himself to be the top juvenile in training by winning several races at the highest level.

Funnily enough, Shamardal is a son of Giants Causeway, a leading young stallion belonging to none other than Coolmore.