Professor Blanaid Clarke from the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin on ‘The Role of Public Interest Directors: Lessons from the Irish Banking Crisis’
This presentation will set out the role played by the “public interest directors” appointed to the Irish banks in the wake of the Irish Government’s blanket deposit guarantee in 2008. Based on private interviews, Professor Clarke will describe the directors’ experiences in seeking to fulfil their statutory duty to act in the public interest. This statutory duty will be compared to section 172 of the UK Companies Act 2006 and recent proposals by the UK Government to provide greater stakeholder input at board level will be discussed in this context.