Secretaries general offer

Much was made in Brian Lenihan's budget speech about high earners in the public service taking substantial pay cuts. He rattled off reductions for the next president, a €14,000 cut for the Taoiseach and drops for other ministers and for future heads of semi-state companies, who will see a cap of €250,000 a year on their pay. But buried in the footnotes to the budget document is the admission that the salary level of a number of secretaries general of key government departments will now be above that of their political masters and can't automatically be adjusted down.

Luckily for taxpayers, Lenihan said the secretaries general have "suggested" that their pay would be voluntarily adjusted to bring them into line with the Taoiseach's salary. Lenihan said he is "agreeable" to this solution. Like the voluntary cuts taken by members of the judiciary last year there is no easy way for the public to know who has, or hasn't, volunteered to take a cut.

Conflicts of interest

With tax-relief schemes axed in the budget last week there will be slightly less work for the country's major law firms. But the good news for one lucky firm is a lucrative government contract we hear is up for grabs.

The NTMA (the source of much profitable consultancy work these days) is looking for legal advisers to work with its in-house banking team headed by former Ulster Bank finance chief Michael Torpey. With the NTMA the chief conduit for the relationship between the government and the banks there is plenty of work involved, particularly with the sale of EBS building society and the recapitalisation of AIB due to heat up early in the new year.

The problem for most of the big firms, though, is that they are already retained by the banks. McCann Fitzgerald has advised AIB and Bank of Ireland has A&L Goodbody on its books.

With conflicts of interest already rife, it will be interesting to see if the NTMA will move outside of the "Big Five" Irish firms or those Chinese walls the firms erect will have to become even Greater.

Nation building

Nationwide UK (Ireland), the British building society, can thank John Terry and Steven Gerrard for the recognition of its brand here. Brendan Synnott, the lender's Irish boss, says its sponsorship of the England football team has been a good marketing tool to ensure its brand is known and isn't confused with another institution.

The obvious danger for the building society was that customers might have thought it was in some way linked with Irish Nationwide, which has so far cost taxpayers €6bn to prop up.

"We were concerned that when people think of Nationwide, they might think of Irish Nationwide, which is a very different proposition to us.

"Nationwide had some penetration here through sponsorship of the England and Northern Ireland teams and we did look to capitalise on that. There is a very big interest in football, particularly the Premier League, so it gave us a leverage point," Synnott told me last week.