The Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland used to be a sinecure for a retiring Secretary General of the Department of Finance... Patrick was the first "external" appointee and certainly has relevant academic and work experience.

Patrick Honohan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Before pursuing postgraduate research, Honohan took a position with the International Monetary Fund in 1971. While completing his PhD in London, he joined the economics staff of the Central Bank of Ireland. During the 1980s, he was Economic Advisor to Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald and subsequently began working with the World Bank. Honohan then spent seven years as a Research Professor with the Economic and Social Research Institute before returning to the World Bank in 1998 as a Lead Economist and subsequently Senior Advisor on financial sector policy.

The author of numerous academic papers and monographs,^[3] he has taught economics at the LSE, University of California, San Diego, the Australian National University and University College Dublin. He was appointed Professor of International Financial Economics and Development in 2007 at Trinity College Dublin.

In September 2009, Honohan was appointed as the tenth governor of the Central Bank of Ireland.

The following December he said in a speech that "ignorance and inattention" by staff at the Financial Regulator were to blame for regulatory failure.

As far as I know he is a respected if mainstream economist known for his blunt talking.  However he appears to have avoided criticism the Central Bank in the above quote and I am unclear what remaining functions (not carried out by the financial regulator or the ECB) continue to justify such a large staff at the Central bank in their preposterous Head office in central Dublin (which was originally built in breach of Planning permission and had to be lowered to become more compliant...an appropriate metaphor for how it conducted itself in other ways...)

Not being an economist I won't comment on the ideological orientation or significance of his research work.

Index of Frank's Diaries