Irish central bank governor to retire at end of year - sources
By Padraic Halpin
DUBLIN (Reuters) - Irish Central Bank Governor Patrick Honohan will announce on Friday he intends to retire at the end of the year, nine months before his seven-year term was due to end, two sources familiar with the decision said.
Honohan, who is also a member of the European Central Bank's (ECB) governing council, was appointed to his role at the height of Ireland's financial crisis in September 2009 and tasked with restoring confidence in its banks and economy.
A leading academic economist, he oversaw a mass recapitalisation of banks and an overhaul of financial regulation and helped negotiate the international bailout Ireland sought in 2010.
"What he will be announcing is he plans to retire at the end of this year," one of the sources said, referring to a scheduled news conference on Friday where Honohan, 65, is due to present the central bank's annual report.
His retirement before the scheduled end of his term in September 2016 means the government will have to name a successor before parliamentary elections due early next year.
Honohan's appointment broke decades of tradition of promoting the top civil servant at the Department of Finance to the governor role. Ireland was struggling at the time with a property crash that had exposed deep regulatory failings and had already led to billions of euros being pumped into its banks.
The bank rescue totalled 64 billion euros (47 billion pounds) - at almost 40 percent of annual economic output, the most expensive in the euro zone - and on Honohan's watch, it took the central bank two attempts to quantify it, first in March 2010 and then a year later after Ireland had entered its bailout.
Honohan became a national celebrity in the lead up to the bailout when, after days of government denials of an imminent aid deal, he phoned up the national radio station to tell the nation that Ireland needed tens of billions of euros in loans.
Since completing the bailout in late 2013, Ireland's economy has become the fastest growing in Europe and its recovering banks have mostly returned to profit.
An economic advisor to the government in the 1980s, Honohan spent nearly a decade working on financial sector policy at the World Bank before returning to Trinity College Dublin in 2007 as professor of international financial economics.
(Editing by Mark Trevelyan/Ruth Pitchford)
