There are very few people who can claim to be excited about the concept of taxation. But for Arthur Andersen managing partner, Mr Roddy Ryan, developments in both corporate and personal taxation continue to provide a daily focus and a healthy income for his firm.

Mr Ryan (42) has been closely involved with the development of Dublin's International Financial Services Centre since its inception and was also a key figure in pioneering a standard 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate in Ireland from 2003.

Educated at Clongowes Wood College, he studied Commerce at University College Dublin and immediately joined Arthur Andersen after graduation. He began working in the firm's tax division and became a partner in 1987.

"I have always enjoyed the tax end of things. My becoming a partner coincided with the enactment of IFSC legislation. I have always been a real champion of the centre."

Andersen's was one of the first companies to move its offices to the fledgling IFSC some 10 years ago. It was largely a building site at that time and was still at a very tentative stage of development. "We persuaded a lot of foreign institutions to come here and were very enthusiastic advocates of the centre from the word go. It is tremendous to see how well it has worked out."

There was a general perception from the outset that the IFSC would become a centre for dealing rooms, something which has failed to materialise. Mr Ryan insists that this was always unrealistic.

"Companies which were looking to centralise dealing rooms were always far more likely to concentrate them in London and Frankfurt rather than Dublin. What is very satisfying though is to see the way quite a number of prestigious international institutions came here and started with one operation and then expanded into a number of different operations."

Mr Ryan is among the group which has influenced the adoption of a standard 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate in Ireland from 2003. In his view, this represents one of the most significant tax developments in Ireland in recent history.

"The 12.5 per cent tax rate is going to be very good for corporate Ireland and will be very good for the services sector in particular. The special 10 per cent corporate tax rate has been established since 1980. It started with manufacturing and has been extended to Shannon, the computer sector and the IFSC, but large chunks of service industry could never qualify. I think we have probably lost out on some developments over the years as a result and may have confined the development of some companies here which weren't doing enough to qualify for the rate."

Corporate tax rates have come down from extremely high rates over the years and Mr Ryan expects they will continue to move down from 32 per cent towards 12.5 per cent between now and 2003.

In spite of the falling rates of tax on business profits, Mr Ryan points to the booming tax revenues.

"While a fair element of that is attributable to foreign manufacturing companies and to IFSC companies, a significant number of Irish companies have also been formed. The whole work ethos and culture of entrepreneurship in Ireland is also fundamentally different than it was 10 years ago."

He suggests that low rates of tax should remain the preferred option in the Irish economy.

"If you think back to the 70s and 80s you had a plethora of tax legislation introduced to the statutes that were really off-putting for people. You had wealth tax, very high rates of capital gains tax and high rates of capital acquisitions tax. There is an old saying that there are two rates of tax at which you get no tax revenue at all. Zero per cent and 100 per cent. For a fair bit of time we weren't far off 100 per cent."

Referring to the myriad of tribunals and inquiries into tax evasion currently under way - some of which date back to the 1970s - Mr Ryan says it is essential for people to remember that a very different climate prevailed then in the Irish economy.

"There was a considerable amount of tax evasion in the early 70s and late 80s but what people forget is that at that time unemployment was high and growing and there was a considerable lack of security. If the top tax rate is 80 per cent the encouragement to actually hide cash away is pretty high, as otherwise you are only going to be keeping 20 per cent for yourself. We are tending to look at these things from a modern perspective."

There is certainly a case to be made that a tax rate of 100 per cent is immoral. In that scenario, he states that people might feel justified in taking things into their own hands. But the situation is substantially better now.

"We are now at a point where tax rates become acceptable. It will always be difficult to decide on a fair rate of taxation but obviously the rule of law has got to be paramount."

Married to Kathryn, Mr Ryan has four daughters aged between five and 12 years. Outside of his family his greatest passion is horse racing. He has recently joined the Turf Club and confesses to having an interest in a number of horses. A regular visitor to Cheltenham he also plays golf. He protests that he does not get to play as often as he'd like, but playing off a handicap of 13, he clearly still manages to get some practise in.

He is also a founding member of the IFSC inner-city trust which collects donations from companies at the centre for use at local schools and charities. In the past four years, it has raised £750,000.

Mr Ryan takes up a position on Arthur Andersen's European Operating Council this week. The 12-member council overseas the firm's operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with a total workforce of 20,000.

This new role will eat into his time and will involve a fair degree of international travel, he admits, while he will continue to oversee the running of the Dublin office. It employs 450 people in the Republic although many other Irish staff have moved to take up positions at the group's international locations.

Much of its fee income in Ireland comes from the Andersen Consulting division, which brings in around 50 per cent of total revenues each year. The rest is earned from its services to the IFSC sector, and providing tax, auditing and corporate finance skills to Irish-based companies.

Mr Ryan insists that despite the frenzy for mergers within the accountancy sector, Arthur Andersen is unlikely to forge an alliance with one of its other rivals.

"I don't think we will do anything and I don't think the regulators would approve it anyway. There would have been clear regulatory problems if the Ernst & Young, KPMG merger had gone ahead. I don't think it is at all likely that there will be another merger."

On the day the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand was announced, he says one of his European colleagues rang to congratulate him on losing one of his competitors. The creation of PricewaterhouseCoopers reduces the big six firms to the big five and will probably yield some benefits to his firm, but he insists they will be negligible.