Lots of activity in the Unidare share register in the past week with Pierce Casey moving in to buy a more than 5 per cent stake, while a group of Unidare non-executive directors headed by John McGuckian bought a near 5 per cent stake being unloaded by British investment house Alliance Capital.

At first glance, it's all very encouraging to see directors digging into their own pockets to buy more than £1.1 million (€1.4 million) worth of their own company's shares. Against that, it's an indication of the lack of interest that Irish institutions have in second-line shares that it was the Unidare directors that had to step in and buy the shares being dumped by Alliance Capital. The Irish institutions were apparently unwilling to pay for Unidare shares at €1.475 (£1.16), the lowest Unidare share price for 10 years.

Now, maybe Pierce Casey and later John McGuckian - who stumped up more than £900,000 of his money to buy a 4 per cent stake - and the other Unidare directors have got a bargain, and certainly the €1.475 price for the shares is less than 4.5 times the forecast earnings for the year to September 1999. Even for a dismal company like Unidare, that seems a bit cheap.

But the fact that institutions were apparently unwilling to buy shares in a second-liner at a less than 4.5 times earnings multiple is a solid indication of the direction the Irish stock market is taking. Companies like Unidare, which have performed pretty poorly in recent years, simply hold no attraction for the domestic fund manager who is now looking to invest on a sectoral basis in Europe. Small domestic engineering companies simply do not rate in this regard.

Maybe it's time to test the mettle of the venture capital industry to see if it will support moves to take companies like Unidare private. Already, ICC is backing the Jones management buyout and the venture capital industry has piously said that it always has money for good projects. Backing an MBO of Unidare on very modest earnings multiples might hold some attractions for the venture capitalists.

Of course, the investor who has done best out of Unidare is Midas-man himself Dermot Desmond who made a profit of £2 million when he sold his 18 per cent-plus stake in Unidare last year at 260p a share - more than twice the current level in the market.

Back then, institutions were happy to take up the shares being sold by the International Investment and Underwriting (IIU) boss. This time around when Alliance Capital was willing to sell at less than half the price got by IIU, the institutions were apparently not interested! What a change of heart in the space of under a year.