Suited and settled in an armchair in the Shelbourne hotel, Mark Keough fits the bill for a US corporate raider in town to snap up Irish assets.
Keough, the new chief executive of Greenstar, the waste business, has much deeper links with the country than that, however. The American accent belies the fact that Keough was born in Roscrea, Co Tipperary, in October 1954.
His early years were spent at Sean Ross Abbey, a “mother and baby” home run by the Sacred Heart Sisters which was at the centre of the Oscar-nominated adoption film Philomena. Keough has no memory of his mother. When he was a year old, he was adopted by an Irish-American couple from Niagara Falls.
“I’m an Irish citizen who has never