Fresh from the dentist's chair where he has undergone an operation, Pat O'Reilly is unsure whether being interviewed for a Director's Chair is a more unpleasant experience. A private man by nature, Mr O'Reilly says he is "not a publicity hound" and he does not believe that the concept of mutuality, where the EBS's depositors own the society, lends itself to personalities taking the limelight.

He has been chief executive for eight years, and has seen profits grow from £12.9 million (#16.4 million) on £143 million of new lending in 1991 to £18.4 million profit and new loan advances of £626 million for 1997, with results due shortly for 1998.

The EBS and Irish Nationwide Building Society are the last remaining building societies operating in the Republic and with Nationwide already having experienced a close brush with flotation last July, EBS could find itself in a lonely position before too long.

Mr O'Reilly relishes the prospect as one which would increase the distinctiveness of the EBS in the eyes of the public.

"The sooner we are the only mutual here, the better we are going to like it.

"You have a public who are confused by all the messages and a public who sometimes say, `A plague on all financial sector houses'," he says.

EBS has actively played the mutuality card in recent years, financing lower lending rates and higher saving rates with £8.9 million of its profits in 1997, and £5.7 million of them in 1996. It has honed down its branches by almost a third, from 60 to 42 over 10 years.

Having evolved a "fast moving management team", it has a 19 per cent share of the new lending market.

"Our mutuality status has been well recognised in the past few years, but has only been recognised when we started doing something about it."

As chief executive, he says he sometimes tries to override that management process, although his style usually is to let senior managers "get on with it".

"I can be obsessive about detail. I can really get stuck into things, particularly because I enjoy it. I can also stand well back from something and let someone else make a mistake," he says.

He describes the value of the society as having been put there by members. The EBS was founded in 1935 by a Co Sligo schoolteacher and member of the first Dail, Mr Alistair McCabe, because teachers found it difficult to get home loans.

A building society, Mr O'Reilly says, "does not have to pay out a third of its profits as a dividend".

"A mutual has a better chance of doing a better job for its customers, whereas a public limited company has first to think about its owners and then about its customers, and the customers are a means to an end," he says.

He refers to the mentality he encountered when he moved over from ICC 12 years ago of "more than pricing". "It is to do with the way that customers are treated. That was here when I came and it was here for generations."

A year into his chief executive office, in 1992, he warned about an over supply of mortgage funds in the market and homeowners borrowing beyond their means. With mortgage rates hitting a 40-year low and house prices at a record high, the danger of overheating is even more apparent.

The worst scenario for the economy is the pressure on wage demands and the threat to the social partnership that could result.

He rejects as "a misconception" the Construction Industry Federation's (CIF) view that setting mortgages at 2.5 times a person's salary is too low a ratio with interest rates as low as they are. "If you take the view that the rates are half what they were five years ago, houses are more than double what they were five years ago. The fall in rates has not at all made up for the increase in prices."

He predicts that an increasing number of prospective buyers will have to be turned away in the coming year even though that leaves them with "an unresolved problem".

"The political system is not working well here. This housing issue has never been to the top of the political agenda in any sustained way. There is no real evidence, either from the Government or the Opposition, that people are really worried about it." He grew up on a farm in Tullyvin, Co Cavan, before joining Ulster Bank in 1960 as a clerk, studying commerce and economics in UCD at night.

He is proud of the values he grew up with, coming from a community where people "saw themselves as equal" and that it is "what you do that matters rather than what you are that matters".

He says he arrived in Dublin with "a healthy scepticism of people who push themselves forward for what they are rather than what they do". After Ulster Bank, he worked for a distribution company, Irish Merchants, before joining ICC's lending division in 1971, rising to head the section, and joining the EBS in 1987.

He is married with four children, two of whom have followed him into the financial sector.

He enjoys golf and reading when he has the time but concedes that the job now is his hobby. "My ideal day off is to go up to Baltray with three of my pals and have competitive four-ball."

He is a member of the council of the Irish Red Cross and recently became president of the European Mortgage Federation, the representative body for the national mortgage lenders' associations across 16 European countries. That body is drawing up a code of practice although most of what is envisaged is already present in Irish consumer law legislation, Mr O'Reilly says.

But the launch of the euro heralds a new era for mortgage lenders, increasing the scope for fixed-rate mortgages at lower rates of about 5.5 per cent.

The institutions will be able to avail of stable long-term funds, the most popular of which is the Pjandbriefe, a mortgage bond with a rating "just below treasury bonds".

He says it will be a year or two before new rates based on that kind of funding appear. The fund has developed over 100 years and cannot be suddenly transplanted "in the morning".