If Shane Ross is so clever and Eircom so dreadful, then why does the senator still have the 20,000 shares he pitched for prior to flotation? Why didn't he sell when the share price rocketed in the period immediately afterwards? Was it not blindingly obvious what the game was?

The self-appointed defender of the ticked-off Eircom shareholder cringes ever so slightly but bats back, "Well I mean what would I have done with the money? Put the £80,000 on deposit somewhere on a lousy rate of interest. I tend to hold on to my shares. Anyway we all thought it would be taken over but there's been a for sale sign up for ages and nobody's interested.

"International interests know that Eircom's not in the international telecommunications league and nobody wants a purely Irish play. The management's just not up to scratch. It's a sort of semi, semi-state. There's overstaffing, a culture of contempt for the customer, it's terrible."

Ross's slight credibility problem is that other commentators had copped the perceived weaknesses of the Eircom management prior to flotation and advised accordingly. Phoenix magazine, for example, urged its readers to buy as many shares as possible and then sell as fast as they could. Those who did made a sizeable profit on their investment.

In contrast, Ross told his readers to buy up, sell only if they were in financial difficulties, but otherwise to sit tight. Eighteen months later, as the shares languish and the shareholders seethe, Ross is leading the charge against Alfie Kane and the company's efforts to reward its management far too handsomely for Ross's taste. It's the least he could do...

The politician in Ross refuses to lay any blame at the feet of the government. He utterly rejects the view that hundreds of thousands of neophytes were suckered into making their first share deal through a combination of high-powered marketing techniques and a political leadership cynically trading on popular ignorance of the market.

As Ross can hardly claim to have been bested by Mary O'Rourke and Charlie McCreevy, he claims instead that it was the banks' fault for handing out loans like lollipops to sugar-starved children.

"The government is responsible for getting the best possible price for a company. It is not duty bound to do anything else," he insists while eventually conceding that the entire flotation extravaganza did "exploit ignorance". Although not his own.

Ross has made a virtual third career out of board bashing. As business editor of the Sunday Independent and part-time commentator on Today FM's Last Word programme, he and presenter Eamon Dunphy have developed a neat double-act. Outrage is the theme as the two handsomely paid media buddies rail against the handsomely paid business buddies on various company boards.

The First Active flotation served as a dry-run for their forthcoming appearance at the Eircom AGM. Ross admits there was a touch of the damp-squib about the First Active outing, largely because he and Dunphy had failed to agree on strategy and allowed themselves to be outmanoeuvred by the even bigger boys at the top table. This time -- with 15,000 proxy votes in their back pockets and a lawyer set to accompany and advise -- Ross is confident that they can at least make a show of the Eircom directors even if they know that they have little chance of rocking any boats that Eircom doesn't want rocked.

`Dunphy is very anxious that this should not be seen as a gimmick," insists Ross, "Profile? I don't need any profile, neither does Eamon." Of course not. The fact that Ross advertises his Eircom campaign through the Sunday Independent radio ad slot, uses his broadcaster wife Ruth Buchanan's voice on his home phone to direct shareholders to her husband's office and uses his Leinster House office answering machine to give further advice on what to do with their proxies is just a manifestation of his altruism, nothing more.

Yet despite the histrionics and very obvious self-aggrandisement that is involved in the Ross/Dunphy Eircom attack, it's hard to fault some of his rationale. It's also very easy to see why the pair have developed a huge panting fan club of the advertising-suckered great unwashed.

The vast majority of those who contacted him have small shareholdings; many of those borrowed to get shares and now realise it would have been easier to tear up the money they borrowed and set fire to it.

Ordinary shareholders, Ross says, are consistently screwed by institutional investors -- the banks and large insurance companies -- all of whom pitch up to each other's AGMs and vote in each other's favour in order to preserve what Ross describes as the corporate Big Boy's club.

Their primary interest, he insists, should be their own customers, the men and women whose money they are investing for their pension funds.

It's hard to think of Ross as an "ordinary" shareholder. Two years ago he sold his house in Shankill, Co Dublin for about £2 million. He now lives in Carrickmines and he and his wife Ruth Buchanan rent out a second home in Anglesea Road in Dublin 4. As a stockbroker in the 1980s Ross was responsible for giving the now multi-millionaire Dermot Desmond his entree into stockbroking when he sold his Dillon and Waldron company to him.

For a period Ross worked with Desmond in the company, a rocky time recalls the senator with huge rows between the two men. Relations improved when Ross left, although he now rarely sees the man.

"Dermot is an incredibly generous person," he says, "He's flamboyant with money. Long after I had left the company, for example, they were doing an audit and he discovered that I owed the company money, quite a sizeable sum at the time. But he just wrote it off which was terribly good of him."

Another big mate of Ross's is former Government Press Secretary PJ Mara who in turn is also a big mate of Eamon Dunphy's. The Last Word's coverage of the allegations made against Mara and Burke at the Flood Tribunal were notable for their "sensitivity".

Ross too is reluctant to talk about his pal and the suggestions made by former Century founder Jim Stafford that Desmond demanded £30,000 from Stafford for Mara as part-payment of a loan that Desmond had allegedly made to Mara.

Within Independent Newspapers Ross is a company man to his fingertips. After railing against Eircom, Ross hesitates for just a millisecond when asked if he regards the Board of Independent Newspapers as a `model' board.

"It's a very fine board," he asserts, "I don't see how it could have done any better given the results we've had this week. Independent Newspaper shareholders are extremely happy." Asked about perceived employment policy in a company where family trees sprout like weeds, the senator is slightly less assured.

"I am absolutely sick of other journalists giving out about Independent Newspapers when they would kill to have their circulation figures," he bats.