The former chairman of IBRC has accused a senior civil servant of "seriously misleading" the Public Accounts Committee.

Alan Dukes has lashed out at comments by Ann Nolan, who told TDs that the former Anglo 'didn't recognise the damage it had done to the country'.

Ann Nolan, the second-in-command at the Department of Finance, yesterday told the Public Accounts Committee she believed Anglo, and then IBRC, believed it was not answerable to the Department in spite of its huge public bailout.

This evening the bank's former chairman Alan Dukes has struck back - saying he and the other directors had been specifically appointed "recover the maximum possible amount from the wreckage" of the bank.

In a statement he says "the new board and management were not the people who had done damage to the country" - whereas Ann Nolan herself was one of the senior figures in the Department "while the damage was being done under its oversight".

He says Anglo was no different to any other bank or company and had to be operated "at arm's length" from the government - and says the tensions that caused were "unnecessary".

And he says any claim that IBRC had "taken a lot of money" from the taxpayer is a distortion of the government's policy - and not what he would expect from a senior public official.