Conlon comes to the end of Bord Gais pipeline

"One of my grandchildren asked me recently, 'what does a chairman do?' It was a very difficult thing to answer without being facetious. I told him: 'He is the guy that gets fired when something goes wrong'," Mr Michael Conlon, retiring chairman of An Bord Gβis, muses.

In his oak-panelled office in Dublin's D'Olier Street for possibly the last couple of weeks - the offices are relocating to Foley Street in the north inner city and he is retiring on November 9th - he is considering the position he has filled for the last 12 years under seven different ministers.

"It's much wider than that," he says, coming back to his grandchild's question. "In a State board it's much more difficult than private enterprise. You have to look after the public, the ministers and everything else. Insofar as I was concerned, I was particularly interested in running the State board as near to a commercial organisation as you could get, given the constraints that are there. I think, in Bord Gβis, we succeeded very well. I am a great person for the bottom line. Micky Joe Costello used to say the greatest discipline in a working situation was the discipline of bankruptcy. I was just looking: in the 12 years I was there we made £705 million."

That was against a background where there never was any State funding and all funds had to be raised independently or generated from profits. As chairman, he figures he has spent at least three days of every week on Bord Gβis business and for the handsome salary, until a few weeks ago, of £7,500 a year. It's just been doubled. By comparison, the non-executive chairman of British Gas gets £450,000.

But he says: "I was never interested in money and still not interested in money. But you certainly need some, at the same time."

Michael Conlon was born in Mount Temple, Co Westmeath, 73 years ago and educated by the Marist Brothers in Athlone, cycling 120 miles a week to and fro.

At the tender age of 33, he became the manager of the second biggest local authority in the State, Cork county, a position he held for 18 years. During that time, he was to become one of the best-known and most charismatic local authority managers.

Early on, he was even seconded to set up an export marketing agency for the pig meat industry, the Pigs and Bacon Commission.

"In hindsight, I stayed too long. I have a theory that 10 years is as long as somebody at the top should stay around. You have a certain line and, obviously, there are people who agree or disagree with that," he says.

Nevertheless, his next two career moves - to become chief executive of the Cork Savings Bank and later chairman of Bord Gβis - each lasted 12 years.

But back to Cork County Council, with its 48-member council and 3,500 employees. "It was like running running a business with an annual meeting in permanent session. They were a very sensible council, in fairness. With a big number, you will get a reasonably good decision at the end of the day."

One such decision was to back their manager when he decided to double the recommended size of the water pipeline from the Inniscarra dam to Ringaskiddy.

The result? Ringaskiddy developed as a major centre for the pharmaceutical industry long before other areas.

He has always liked to know the people working with him, whether councillors or road workers. "If I was passing a roads job, I would get out of the car and sit down and have a mug of tea with them," he says.

The Ringaskiddy experience influenced him in his insistence on getting approval for the first interconnector for Bord Gβis under the Irish Sea and at a size which has been able to carry the company forward to 2002. That he views as his greatest achievement in the company. Construction on the second interconnector starts shortly.

His greatest regret of the last 12 years is more personal - "what is now called the Hugh Coveney problem".

This was when the late Mr Coveney, then Minister for the Marine and a personal friend, made a call that could have been interpreted as lobbying Mr Conlon for business for one of the Coveney companies. Mr Coveney had to resign. "Two things annoyed me about that: that anyone would have thought Hugh Coveney would have looked for favouritism or than anyone would think I would be influenced by it, seeing I spent 18 years dealing with councillors and ministers."

He had an idea that after the county council, he never wanted to work in an organisation with more than 200 employees, so the Cork Savings Bank seemed an ideal choice. It had 80 employees, made a profit of £350,000 and had a somewhat smaller board of 22 directors. By the time he left as chief executive, it had 500 employees in 35 branches and an annual profit of £5 million.

"The way we developed at that time was unbelievable. We had great young staff," he recalls. And he says that they received only the smallest incentives although it was across the board.

"I believe if you have incentives at all, they go to everybody or nobody. If you give incentives to the top people... I find that hard to reconcile with team effort."

Contraction, rather than expansion, in staff numbers became Michael Conlon's focus at Bord Gβis. In the early 1980s, there were 1,600 employees; today it's 800. And many of the people who left the company now have their own companies, working on a contract basis for Bord Gβis.

Change from a bureaucratic to a marketing culture was something he wanted for Bord Gβis. And training.

"I believe you have to train people, you have to look after them, give them responsibility for what they want to do, do some measurement of what they do and reward them for it. At the end of the day we have an excellent staff, extremely well-trained, able to take their place in competition with the other countries, which is what they have to do."

EU rules mean that there will be open competition in gas supply within a short time.

"We are looking at how we continue to develop as a company if we are going to lose customers. We will look at alternative things we can do, more diversification. One of the things is fibre-optic cable. We are also looking at different ways of leveraging from our database.

"We have 350,000 customers: we could sell them electricity or other services, selling even domestic services, like house alarms. In other words, if you know the customers and you're a critical supplier, they will use you for other services," he insists. And the future ownership of the company also has to be determined.

Mr Conlon says: "I think Bord Gβis is in a position at the moment to continue to develop and to be in a position to advance whatever way the major shareholder (the State) decides to go, whether IPO or whatever."

He favours privatisation. "I think it's more or less inevitable from the fact of going into open competition, you have to get freedom to operate and an IPO has the ability of raising equity, which is something any company that wants to develop further will need. We will need it as well because at the moment we have developments, particularly pipeline developments, that in aggregate will cost at least £1 billion and will have to be funded," he says.

And he believes strongly that the workers should be able to have shares in the company.

Many people would have considered Mr Conlon as a very political person, but he insists he is not, though his father and mother were "very nationalistic".

He thinks that impression dates to 1977 when Jack Lynch asked him to stand for Fianna Fβil in the crucial by-election caused by the death of Labour's Dan Desmond.

He felt he could not, having just joined the Savings Bank. "He tried very hard. My wife (Kitty) was against me going into anything political. Sometimes, I still regret I didn't go then. Jack lost the by-election," he recalls.

Kitty - "she's a great character" - also insists that after 55 years in public life, he is entitled to a rest. Instead of all the work and the travel, Michael Conlon plans to spend more time with his seven grown-up children and 13 grandchildren and play more golf... but there's also the chairmanship of his son, Rory's computer company and the Mercy Hospital.