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In comparison to Tom Barton, Kennedy was a different kind of adventurer. He was driven by an irresistible curiosity, which perhaps had its origins in a form of childhood escapism developed by the presence of an overweening mother. This later developed into a desire to escape the dreary provincial life of Limerick City and his island home in search of exoticism and adventure.
His mother had wanted a different life for her son, different to that she had led as the wife of a driver who worked for the local bus company. In the hard times she had been content to have a husband with a secure job, not well paid, but he had a job, unlike others in the family who had been forced to cross the water to find work.
When her husband, who was older than she by several years, retired, things would have been difficult had not Pat already started to work his way up in the world. Things changed in Ireland, the country had finally thrown off its economic constraints with a surge of growth and prosperity, which enabled him to repay the efforts his parents had made to provide him with an education.
His marriage to Margaret, the only daughter of a well-to-do farmer and landowner, had been a big step up the social ladder, but to their disappointment, and in spite of her prayers, the couple remained childless.
When Margaret inherited the farm and its dependencies they left the management to a tenant farmer. She, dedicating her life to work with the Sisters of Charity at a nearby convent; he, to his flourishing accountancy firm. As his clientele grew he travelled whenever he found an excuse to get away from Limerick, first to Dublin, then further afield to London and the Continent.
It was more than a dozen years since Pat joined the board of what was at that time the Irish Union bank. The appointment followed his success in introducing of the Nederlandsche Nassau Bank to Fitzwilliams, then engineering the merger between the two banks to form the Irish Netherlands Bank, known as INB.
From that point onwards Pat became the confident of Fitzwilliams, opening the door to other opportunities, going from strength to strength. He considerably reinforced his position as executive business development director through the successful negotiations with Sergei Tarasov for the creation of an Anglo-Russian holding bank, formed between INB and InterBank, known as the INI Banking Corporation, which was in effect a holding company.
Kennedy then fixed his sights on China, starting with Hong Kong, where a new world awaited him. His imagined a mixture of twenty first century Hong Kong and Shanghai mixed with that of the legendary Middle Kingdom, full of promise, discovery and fabulous gains.
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