Nonetheless, a single management team continued to run both banks, which shared many services and back office functions.

He was briefed to spearhead a campaign to raise the bank’s profile, which included innovations such as lower interest rates.

Lacey commissioned a high-profile advertising campaign, featuring fictitious NIB manager Martin, who would repeatedly call his cousin Niall about the great deals the bank was offering.

[2] In 1993, Irish crime lord Martin Cahill planned a raid on NIB, using then CEO Jim Lacey and his family as hostages to extract up to €10 million in cash.

In early 1993 John "The Coach" Traynor met with his boss Cahill to provide him with inside information about the inner-workings of NIB at College Green, Dublin.

[3] On 1 November 1993, Cahill's gang that included Brian Meehan seized Lacey and his wife outside his home in Blackrock.

[2] Holding them at Lacey's home, Kavanagh was brought in and tied up, telling the family that he had been abducted two weeks before.

Kavanagh was then to call the Irish newspapers from his hospital bed, and claim he was a victim of the Lacey kidnapping gang.

Released on bail, in 1994, Cahill was murdered by a claimed Irish Republican Army hitman close to his home in Rathmines, who had been paid for by rival drug gang crime lord and former Cahill gang member John Gilligan.

In June 2005, Andrew Healy was appointed chief executive officer of National Irish Bank.

The Garda Síochána heavily criticised this action, stating that it leaves the bank exposed in the future to replica attacks.