Do not expect to hear many Kerryman jokes reverberating around Government Buildings during the next month, writes Emmet Oliver
How do you get a Kerryman to climb on to the roof of a pub? Tell him the drinks are on the house.
What should you do if a Kerryman throws a pin at you? Run like mad - he's probably got the grenade between his teeth.
How do you keep a Kerryman occupied for the day. Leave him in a room with a sheet marked P.T.O. on both sides.
On and on they go. We all know at least one. We have all probably told at least one or two Kerryman jokes. There is even a website devoted to them. But let's face it, they are as corny as they are infantile.
And do not expect to hear too many of them reverberating around Government Buildings during the next month. Because a very proud Kerryman, Maurice O'Connell, is returning to his old haunts to conduct a crucial exercise affecting all Ministers and their Departments. O'Connell and two other former senior civil servants, Dermot Quigley and Kevin Bonner, have been asked to vet next year's spending estimates.
The so-called "three wise men" this week began poring over the spending proposals of all Government Departments. In the next few weeks, a procession of senior officials and Ministers will have to come before them and justify their plans.
O'Connell and the other two are mild-mannered, cautious and controlled men, but the message going out to Departments at this stage is - be afraid.
"If there is any frivolous item of expenditure, or budget line which cannot be sustained, these are the guys who will find it," said one observer this week.
In retirement, 66-year-old O'Connell has become a leading - maybe the foremost - member of the "great and the good", the group of people Ministers and others look towards when someone with experience, wisdom and integrity is needed to take on a difficult and sensitive task.
He chairman of the Forum on Broadcasting which reported recently, and is currently co-ordinating the Football Association of Ireland's inquiry into events during this summer's World Cup campaign in the Far East.
"The whole Kerry thing is big with Maurice. He has never lost the accent and he is a bit of a celebrity down there. He plays it up sometimes, you know - 'don't mind me, I'm just up from the country' - and some people foolishly fall for it.
"But he is as sharp as they come and doesn't miss a trick," according to one civil servant who worked with him in the Department of Finance in the 1980s.
O'Connell is from the small town of Moyvane, near Listowel, and was educated in the area. He still visits it regularly.
Anyone trying to fool him is likely to be found out. Once described as looking like a character from a Flann O'Brien novel, minus the flat cap and bicycle clips, he is in many ways a benign version of the cute, shrewd Kerryman of Irish literature.
It is no surprise that he has been friends with renowned Kerry writers like Brendan Kennelly over the years.
With his thick-rimmed glasses and wild wisps of hair, he may look like a harmless country uncle, but make such a misjudgment at your peril, say sources.
While the FAI and broadcasting forum roles have given him the chance to broaden his experience, his part in shaping next year's estimates brings him back to his traditional territory.
He knows a thing or two about cuts, having joined the Department of Finance in 1962. "He's been through more hair shirts than most people have been through suits," one person said this week.
His experience includes the oil crisis of the 1970s, the spending splurge of the late 1970s, the austerities of the early 1980s, the post-1987 recovery, the currency crisis, the rampant 1990s boom, and the introduction of the euro. O'Connell, first as a senior civil servant in the Department of Finance and then as the Governor of the Central Bank, has seen them all.
It is a peculiarity of the man that, having witnessed such major economic upheavals, he has not apparently developed a strong personal economic philosophy.
"He is a pragmatist, through and through. He is definitely not an ideologue," said a source. While he retains a firm belief in sound money policies and keeping spending under control, O'Connell is not known for setting out grand economic visions.
This, and his propensity for taking on too much work, are the only faults most people cite.
Others comment that O'Connell is everything most bankers are not. While he travelled much during recent years because of EMU, particularly to Frankfurt, the sometimes lavish lifestyle of fellow European central bankers was not for him.
While many bankers are all cigar smoke and brandy, O'Connell lists his hobbies as gardening and watching Kerry play. "Devoid of vanity" is one description used of him.
During his time at the Central Bank he ate in the staff restaurant and did away with the executive dining room.
His third-level education in the classics means he expresses himself, at least on paper, with great clarity and purpose, and politicians over the years have found it easy to work with him. Ray MacSharry, finance minister in the Fianna Fáil minority government of the late 1980s, was said to be a particularly big fan.
IN front of the cameras, he appears less confident and during the often tense hearings on the DIRT scandal, he sometimes looked a little lost. "He finds it stultifying to be in front of the lights," says one source.
Throughout this period, he tried to explain that the Central Bank looked after the "prudential" aspects of financial regulation. Essentially this meant making sure that banks remained solvent.
But the public and press were most interested in consumer protection and the bank seemed to have less to say about this. Others felt sympathy for O'Connell on the basis that a lot of the lapses being exposed were not of his making.
His reappearance on the public stage and at Government Buildings comes at a tricky time. The public finances are looking ragged and, while they are far from being in crisis, some tough decisions lie ahead. O'Connell, like many public servants who started their careers in the 1960s, genuinely rejoiced when Ireland finally got the economic mix right in the late 1980s and 1990s.
For he had always been graphic and brutally honest about how bad things were in the 1980s. "We were always scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to balance the budget. I worked on the budget during the 1980s. A surplus was almost unimaginable at the time. We used to dream about what it would be like to have a surplus."
The question now is whether we will have to start dreaming again.