So are McCann pere et fils simply buying undervalued shares or are they laying the foundation for a move to take Fyffes private?

Certainly if the family have aspirations to take Fyffes back private, they will find no shortage of takers as long as the price is right.

That said, even the most disgruntled institutional shareholder is not going to accept an offer for Fyffes shares at anything remotely near their bombed-out level now. So the McCanns will need to think in terms of a price well in excess of the €1.00 (78.8p) a share at which they bought two million shares last week if they have realistic aspirations of doing a deal.

Fyffes is worth about €275 million now, but that includes €64 million in cash as of the end of October. Assuming that institutions would look for at least €350 million for the company - and that's only €1.20 a share - it would leave a family buyout of Fyffes dependent heavily on venture capital.

The McCanns may be one of the country's wealthiest families, but even they could not finance such a deal on their own and would undoubtedly need the backing of venture capitalists. And those venture capitalists would need reassurance that the cash could be generated to meet the costs of the heavy borrowings that would be needed for a McCann-led buyout of Fyffes.

The other alternative, however, is to look for a trade buyer for Fyffes and here American group Dole is the only realistic possibility. Dole had a €1.15 offer for Fyffes spurned about five years ago, but the logic of merging the two operations is still there.

The McCanns are caught between a rock and a hard place. The company's standing among institutional investors - particularly that sad bunch of overseas institutions who bought DCC's stake in Fyffes for up to €3.90 a share - is now virtually non-existent, so the case for maintaining public company status is decidedly shaky. Could the family put a financing package together for a buyout or should they look to merge with the likes of Dole.

One way or the other, beleaguered shareholders will be hoping for some action.

Kerry might be the darling of the Irish stock market, and justifiably so, given the price growth it has been able to produce for its shareholders over the past few years.

But now the gurus at Merrill Lynch have gone cool on the stock and removed it from its European Midcap Stocks strategic buy list. "While the share price has enjoyed a good run this year, more recently consensus estimates have started to head lower. For a stock that should be able to grow its earnings through a slow down, the defensive qualities that once were attractive now seem questionable," Merrill's muse.

Can anybody out there decipher what that piece of analyst waffle actually means. It certainly doesn't tally with what most analysts this reporter has spoken to have say about the stock.

The consensus view among Irish analysts is that Kerry will grow earnings by 75 per cent in full-year 2000. And looking ahead, the group's acknowledged ability to do big earnings enhancing deals should mean that it warrants a premium and not the sort of analyst-speak that Merrill Lynch has churned out.