Ian Stuart confesses that he always wanted to be managing director of a large company. He describes himself as ambitious and says he believes in "smashing traditions and questioning everything".

If an employee tells him that something has to be done in a certain manner, "because it has always been done that way", they are likely to incur his wrath. But he finds the insurance industry does not make his blood boil too often. He has also found himself in the position of managing director during one of the more interesting periods in the sector.

Despite the ambitious streak his career has not been one seamless ascent to the top. He spent many of his early years travelling the State trying to raise investment for projects as diverse as picture framing and candle manufacturing.

He even spent time working in the 1970s with a then fledgling mining company called Bula Resources. A subject which, in the light of recent events, he does not wish to linger on.

He is a chartered accountant by training and says that throughout his career he has sought to stretch the limits of the label and break into areas which are sometimes off limits to accountants, such as IT, personnel and administration.

A robust speaker who moves from point to point at breakneck speed, he says traditions can only be justified if they are logical and efficient.

"I have never believed in doing things just because they have always been done a certain way, I favour looking at things in their own right to see if they are effective within the company," he says.

Educated at Blackrock College and Trinity College he never expected to end up in the insurance business, but says whatever job one takes up "it should be fun". With a turnover last year of £132.4 million and pre-tax profits of £15.4 million, Eagle Star is the Republic's fifth largest insurer and has plans to become bigger. In the other half of its business - pensions - the company aims to be number one by the year 2000.

Mr Stuart admits that at present the insurance industry is extremely competitive with consolidation and EMU likely to squeeze companies further.

Most of the main insurance companies in the Republic are subsidiaries of multinationals and what those multinationals decide to do is normally what makes the greatest impact on the market here.

Eagle Star's parent, Zurich Financial Services, Mr Stuart says, lets the Irish management "get on with the job" and accepts that implementing worldwide policies may not work if local factors are not taken into account.

With 57 companies in the area of general insurance the market is quite crowded, with many firms desperately trying to hold onto a tiny slice. Mr Stuart firmly says that anyone with less than 5 per cent of the market "has no longterm future".

All this is a long way from the industry he entered in 1980 with Shield Insurance which was later subsumed into Eagle Star.

He says insurance companies were run then by "traditional insurance operators" and accountants and actuaries were invisible at top management level.

He spent much of the early 1980s doing his job as Shield's group accountant, but also had a keen interest in IT.

One of his motivations behind this was the vision of the paperless office. "We spent many years dreaming that we could create a paperless office in the company, but we could never pull it off," he says.

While eliminating paper remains a dream, the early entry into the computer age by Mr Stuart and other managers at the company is now paying off handsomely, he says.

"We believe we have one of the most advanced IT systems in the industry and our early moves into that area gave us an edge over those who waited around," he states.

While he pursued his role as group accountant and kept an eye on developments in IT, he constantly asked for more work and new areas of responsibility. "I just kept asking to be involved in more areas of the company and thankfully people didn't seem to mind," he says.

By the early 1990s he was overseeing personnel, finance, IT and administration and had taken up the post of company secretary. In 1995, outgoing managing director, Mr Michael O'Rourke, decided to step down and Mr Stuart got his chance. After a few days of moving his files and possessions into the new office he realised what being the managing director meant.

"I suddenly found I couldn't talk to anyone, I was the managing director and no longer had anyone to refer upwards to," he says.

"I remembered the times when I could give my advice to the managing director and then say, `well I'm going home, and that was that'," he says. "But now I have to worry about decisions all the time and can't just leave them to someone else," he adds.

He says when he took over, the focus of the company had to be changed from a concentration on the processes involved in providing a service to "the customers themselves".

"It meant a total change for everyone in the organisation, I talked to everyone in the company until I ran out of words and used their views to devise a strategy for the future," he says.

He says consultation with staff continues to be a cornerstone of his management philosophy. "I arrange a breakfast meeting with 10 randomly selected members of staff every week and seek their views, for example."

While the randomly tested staff members are often circumspect initially, he says most of them soon open up and have no hesitation in telling the managing director about how the company can be improved.

"If you don't hear it from the people on the ground, you could find yourself in serious trouble, after all I have only one brain so I need the input from everybody else," he says.

He likes to keep staff relations informal, he says, and is no stranger to walking around the company's head office in Ballsbridge and talking to people casually.

With the new informality and communication channels established, he said the atmosphere was radically changed within three months.

The corporate strategy changed too and within two years of his becoming managing director the company made its first acquisition when it acquired Irish National.

This acquisition "fitted well with our business", he says, and adds that the recipe for expanding the company further is "pleasing our two customers, who are the insured and the brokers who sell our products".

The future for consumers, however, is probably going to involve price rises, he says. "Claims costs are rising, while EMU will mean less investment income, so something will have to give."

Where the axe will fall he cannot say, but before the end of the year premiums may come under pressure, he adds.

A large segment of the company's business is motor insurance and Mr Stuart feels strongly about the issue. "We have had cases where we paid out £2 million for just the one accident," he points out.

"Quite simply the cost of claims are outrageous and unsustainable, but more important is the total devastation brought upon families," he says.

"We can talk about all the other things, like bad roads, but speed is the crucial factor and with the economy booming we are seeing a flood of faster and faster cars coming onto the market," he adds.

The spiralling cost of employers' liability insurance is equally a major problem, he says. "Once again the costs awarded in this area are higher in Irish courts than in most of the rest of Europe and no insurance company is making money from employers' liability insurance at present," he says.

"Having said that, things are improving, you do see more hard hats now than you used to, when people thought they would be all right once they had a good head of hair to protect them," he says.

He says solutions to these two problems lie with the Government, not insurance companies. "We would like to see these things sorted out, we live in this country and are part of it, so we would like to see some political movement as much as anyone else," he says.