THE pharmaceutically poisoned chalice of the VHI chairmanship was passed this week to Derry Hussey. But be assured this corporate veteran knew what he was letting himself in for.
Throughout his career, the 62-year-old chartered accountant has assiduously looked before leaping into his diverse dealings in his personal life and in the world of business and finance. As far as Mr Hussey is concerned, if something is worth doing well, it is worth meticulous research.
So Derry Hussey knows that what lies ahead are sporadic battles with British competitors BUPA and boardroom wranglings in the bowels of a volatile and increasingly less profitable VHI. He will know, for instance, that his predecessor, Noel Hanlon, who came to the end of his five-year contract on Tuesday, will have done his utmost to lift the once-buoyant company out of its present quagmire.
He knows too that the Minister for Health, Michael Noonan, has been making noises about cutting the organisation loose from the Department. Derry Hussey knows there are challenges ahead.
His friends insist the main reason Hussey agreed to the post is that it would afford him a chance, as he saw it, to contribute to society. It may seem sickly sweet, but a social conscience appears to have informed various stages of his life.
It led, his friends say, to his Fine Gael involvement. "Derry didn't come from a political family so there was no motivation there," says a close friend.
When Garret FitzGeraId was assembling a strategy team to plan the 1981 election, he looked almost immediately to Hussey. He had met him through Gemma, then the Fine Gael leader in the Seanad. Derry was to form an integral part of what FitzGerald refers to in his autobiography as "one of the most successful organisational systems devised by a political party in independent Ireland".
According to FitzGerald, Hussey brought "calm, stability and order" to the committee which was largely credited for putting Fine Gael in power on two subsequent occasions.
Derry Hussey was born in Terenure, Dublin, and schooled in St Mary's College in Rathmines. He lives with his family in the same area. He met Gemma Hussey while completing a UCD commerce degree.
Theirs is a particularly close relationship, a fact stressed by friends and alluded to by Gemma in her diaries, when she wrote of the support he gave her whenever life in the Dail became difficult.
For his part, he was said to have been "deeply hurt" when his wife was demoted from her post as Minister for Education and given the much less desirable European Affairs brief, and later, Social Welfare.
They have three children: Rachel, Ruth and Andrew. The eldest, Rachel, a solicitor, recently gave birth to a girl.
Hussey - a non-executive director of nine Irish companies - began his career with tyre manufactures Dunlop before joining the farm machinery company Massey Ferguson. In 1972 a group of distribution manufacturing and shipping companies he had joined seven years earlier merged to form the Jones Group.
For 20 years the company, in the words of one business commentator, "had a very good run of things". As financial director of the group, Hussey was a key player in the company's flotation on the stock market in 1973. But in the early 1990s the company experienced a rapid fall in profits. In the 10 months before Mr Hussey's departure as finance director, the Jones Group had to sell off two of its divisions at a £7.5 million loss in a desperate attempt to reverse its profit dive.
In July 1993 Mr Hussey resigned from his executive position in the company - as did fellow board member and current chairman Denis Magee - and took a non-executive post which he still holds. At the time the perception in business circles was that a few individuals had taken the blame for what many saw as unavoidable market-influenced developments. It is worth noting that the current share price is less than half what it was when Mr Hussey resigned as financial director.
Since then he has become involved with Ballycullen Farms in Tallaght, Dublin - a stretch of land acquired in the early 70s by the Jones family, with whom he has maintained firm ties. The family was successful in haying the land rezoned from agricultural to housing and commercial use and the development now represents a potentially lucrative investment.
Sister Stanislaus, president of the housing agency Focus Point Ireland, where Hussey is also a board member, applauds the "considerable social commitment" shown by him in his dealings with the agency. "Of course he is businesslike and great at balancing our budget, which has the obvious constraints of a voluntary agency," she says. "However, he is also terribly interested in the work we do which shows, I think, another side to Derry Hussey."
This other side is attested to in eloquent terms by friends and colleagues who speak of his boundless energy. His choice of holidays is eclectic and he has a deep interest in world affairs.
More spiritual than religious, he is passionate about theatre and music, enjoying the post-performance appraisal almost as much as the event itself.
He is a "serious" collector of Irish art and enjoys fine wine. He plays golf- with a handicap of 18 - regularly in, Woodenbridge in Co Wicklow.
As far as Michael Noonan is concerned, the VHI needs to be "calmed down" and the Health Minister is understood, say sources, to be "supremely confident" that Hussey has the "time and the talent" to get things done.