PROFILE-Ireland's Central Bank Governor Patrick Honohan

Incumbent: Patrick Honohan

Date of Birth: October 1949

Term: Appointed in September 2009 for a seven-year term. Can be reappointed for further terms.

Key facts:

-- A voting member of the European Central Bank's Governing Council, Honohan has helped oversee the recapitalisation and restructuring of the Irish banking sector, which collapsed after the country's property bubble burst in 2008.

-- He has been tasked with the overhaul of Ireland's financial regulatory system after reckless bank lending and a string of deposit and loan scandals surrounding Anglo Irish Bank destroyed the reputation of the "Celtic Tiger" economy.

-- The appointment of Honohan, an economics professor at Trinity College Dublin, broke the decades-old tradition of promoting the top civil servant at the Department of Finance to governor.

-- Although picked by the government, Honohan has been more outspoken than his predecessor John Hurley, criticizing the cabinet in a report in June 2010 for budgetary policies that contributed to the overheating of the economy in the run-up to the crisis.

-- An academic expert on banking and financial systems, Honohan earlier spent nearly a decade at the World Bank where he was a senior adviser on financial sector policy.

-- A graduate of University College Dublin, he received his Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics in 1978. He has taught economics at the LSE, the University of California-San Diego, the Australian National University and University College Dublin, as well as at Trinity College.

-- A prime ministerial adviser in Ireland the 1980s, Honohan also spent several years as an economist at the Central Bank of Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, and at the International Monetary Fund (1971-73).

(Reporting by Dublin Newsroom; Editing by David Cutler)