Tony O’Reilly – Ireland’s golden child

The passing of Tony O’Reilly yesterday brings the curtain down on a life well lived

Tony O’Reilly, who has died in St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin shortly after his 88th birthday, was the golden boy of Irish sport and business, playing international rugby for Ireland at the age of 18 and the British and Irish Lions while still a teenager, before going on to become the most glamorous international Irish businessman of his generation.

He was chief executive of HJ Heinz in Pittsburgh in the US, and owner and chairman of Independent Newspapers Ltd in Dublin as well as leading a raft of other successful and unsuccessful enterprises, including Fitzwilton, Atlantic Resources, Eircom and Waterford Glass.

He and his first wife, Susan, were “business royalty” not only at home but in her native Australia. They maintained an opulent lifestyle, flying by private jet from their home in the US for glittering social gatherings at their Castlemartin stud in Co Kildare and their homes in Glandore, Co Cork, and Lyford Cay, in the Bahamas.

O’Reilly began his business career in earnest at Bord Bainne, where he is credited with inventing the Kerrygold brand. Tall, good looking, suave and witty, he was the epitome of what a wealthy international businessman should be. But his philosophy of “studied indifference” on and off the sports field may eventually have led to his undoing.

His lasting achievement was the Ireland Funds, which raised vast amounts of money to pump into projects on both sides of the Irish Border, in the belief that raising the standards of living in the divided communities would heal deep sectarian wounds.

O’Reilly’s story is the stuff of legend. He hobnobbed with royalty and world leaders and celebrities on several continents and at one time was touted as a future government minister and even taoiseach.

His hospitality made him a popular figure, and to be invited to the top table at lavish dinners in his art-filled home was to bask in a reflected glow.

He liked reading biographies of great men, Churchill being a favourite, and then distributing copies (signed by him) to friends and acquaintances with carefully thought-out inscriptions.

He was also quick-witted and an eloquent public speaker, his contributions peppered with quotations, sporting analogies, self-deprecating anecdotes and entertaining insights that kept guests spellbound. Close friends did however quibble that he re-cycled many of the stories from one speech to the next, depending on location and audience.

Yet sadly, O’Reilly’s declining years had all the elements of a Shakespearean tragedy.

He lost Independent News and Media to his nemesis Denis O’Brien (who lost an estimated €300m in the process); he was overwhelmed by personal debt and had to sell Castlemartin (bought in 1978) and his townhouse in Fitzwilliam Square; and unable to negotiate a settlement of his enormous personal borrowings (estimated at €195m), he went bankrupt in Bermuda.

He largely retreated from public life and isolated himself from many old friends, living between his second wife’s stud farm in Deauville, France and Hollyhill Stud, Co Kildare.

Tony O’Reilly (Dr AJF or Sir Anthony, depending on the era) was the son of customs officer Jack (John P) O’Reilly from Drogheda, Co Louth, who married Judith Clarke in 1928.

After moving to Dublin, they had four children and Jack qualified as a barrister while holding on to his day job.

After the birth of their fourth child his wife remained in hospital for over a year and her sisters and mother took over the upbringing of the family, with two of the girls enrolled in a convent in Holyhead, Wales at a very young age.

Tony O’Reilly would later tell biographer Ivan Fallon that his father Jack (30) then moved into lodgings, where the landlord had 10 children, including a beautiful daughter called Aileen (22).

Unusually for the time, she left with him and they set up home in Pembroke

Road, acting like a married couple. On May 7, 1936, Anthony Joseph Francis O’Reilly was born to parents who declared themselves on his birth cert as Mr and Mrs O’Reilly.

They moved to Griffith Avenue on Dublin’s northside, and their son Tony was enrolled in Belvedere College in 1942 at the age of seven. Three years later he began playing rugby.

In 1951, at the age of 15, he was picked for the senior team. In what sounds astonishing today, he also learned about his father’s “dark” past when a couple of priests called him in “for a chat”.

They told him that his parents were not married and — worse still in their eyes — that his father had a family of four children. The young O’Reilly went home as usual that evening, but said nothing to his parents, never raising the issue until 20 years later.

He only told his wife Susan, 12 years after they were married.

He would later tell an interviewer that his half-sisters and brothers “were the ones who were short-changed because they lost out on their father”. His father and mother eventually married in 1973.

He stayed in school to repeat his Leaving Cert and captained Belvedere to the Schools Senior Cup Final in Lansdowne Road, but they were narrowly beaten by Blackrock.

He left school in 1954 with the intention of becoming a barrister. But life and rugby consumed most of his time.

He got his first cap for Ireland in January 1955 and he won 28 more, with a gap of seven years between his second last and last international appearance.

He toured South Africa in 1955 with the British and Irish Lions, and Australia and New Zealand in 1959, playing in 10 tests and scoring a record six international tries. His 23 tries in test rugby, including 17 in 17 matches in New Zealand was also a Lions record.

Back in Ireland working in Suttons Seeds in Cork he heard Susan Cameron, a girl he had met but moved on from

To be invited to a lavish dinner in his art-filled home was to bask in a reflected glow

during the Lions tour of Australia, was in London. Against her better judgement they met and she accepted an invitation to come to Ireland, where they got engaged in 1961.

At the age of 25, in 1962, he took over running Bord Bainne. It was also the year he married Susan. they settled in Mount Merrion, south Dublin where they had three (of six) children and a Jack B. Yeats on the wall.

Jack Lynch, then minister for industry & commerce later persuaded him to run Erin Foods. The job came with a Mercedes, a chauffeur, Arthur Whelan, and secretary Olive Deasy, both of whom remained with him for the rest of his business career.

During January, 1966 he holidayed in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands with Charlie Haughey, then minister for agriculture. While their families enjoyed the sunshine and the beaches the two men worked on the details of a joint venture between Erin and the American conglomerate HJ Heinz.

Although this put O’Reilly on the road to corporate success and wealth, Haughey was never invited to Castlemartin. The men’s egos were too big for the same room, said Haughey’s friend, PJ Mara.

Now living the life of a budding plutocrat in a Georgian house in Delgany,

Co Wicklow, he travelled to a business meeting in Pittsburgh on the last voyage of the Queen Mary in 1967. The following year he moved to London to take over as head of Heinz UK.

He also made a return to the rugby field in 1969, joining London Irish. In 1970 the rugby fraternity was shocked when he was recalled to the international side to play England at Twickenham after a seven-year absence. Ireland lost, but his appearance became the stuff of legend. Variations of a story were told that as O’Reilly walked (slowly) over the touchline to collect the ball, an Irish fan shouted: “Why don’t you get Arthur [the chauffeur] to get it for you, he’d be a lot quicker.”

After two years he moved with his family to Pittsburgh and through hard work and charm began his steady rise through the ranks of Heinz, eventually becoming CEO. According to Forbes magazine, he earned $119m in 1996 a year before his retirement.

In tandem with his role as a ‘super executive’ he was involved in plotting a career that would make him the best-known businessman in Ireland. It began with the acquisition of a public company, Crowe Wilson, followed by Dockrell’s, Goulding’s and a stake in Tara Mines. But his biggest prize came in 1973 when he acquired Independent Newspapers from the heirs of its founder, William Martin Murphy.

For a relatively small outlay, less than £5m, he acquired a controlling interest in the newspaper group, bringing in executives Bartle Pitcher and Liam Healy to run the business.

O’Reilly’s aim to create “an international communications group” was a triumph. In Ireland it acquired the Sunday World and a half-share in the Daily Star and eventually control of the loss-making Sunday Tribune .An Australian affiliate APN (of which INM had 40pc) owned over 400 newspaper titles and radio stations in Australia and New Zealand, as well as advertising and media interests in Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and India.

His investment in the Independent in London was a drain on resources that he was prepared to suffer because of its prestige and the Belfast Telegraph, bought to support the peace process, led to his elevation to Sir Anthony O’Reilly at the request of British prime minister Tony Blair.

In the meantime, he also won the battle for control of the once stateowned phone service Eircom, beating an ambitious young rugby enthusiast Denis O’Brien in the process. It was a victory that would have far reaching consequence for both men.

O’Reilly’s contention that the newspaper was “the ultimate browser” was proved wrong by events, as the internet and the mobile phone revolutionised modern media.

His main cash cow, Independent News & Media (INM) was not only slow to adopt, but made the common blunder of putting everything online for free.

The other catastrophe that engulfed him around the same time was a huge patriotic investment in Waterford Wedgewood. It was as if he believed he could save the renowned brand by sheer force of will, instead of which it drained him of the resources that he needed to stave off O’Brien who was steadily building a stake in INM.

When Waterford Wedgewood went into liquidation in 2009 with debts of nearly €1bn, it is estimated that O’Reilly and his brother-in-law Peter Goulandris, had lost over €500m between them during the previous 19 years.

INM had been under siege since 2003, when Denis O’Brien bought 3pc of the stock for almost €60m. A billionaire from investing the proceeds of Ireland’s first mobile telephone licence in Digicel, he was still smarting from his failure to acquire Eircom and what he believed was unfavourable coverage in O’Reilly’s newspapers.

Although he was regarded as the de facto owner of INM, at this stage O’Reilly had diluted his stake to 28pc. With O’Brien continuing to buy shares, it was becoming clear that O’Reilly no longer had the money to mount a defence against O’Brien’s ambitions — or his grudges, if that was the way you looked at it.

In a last-ditch attempt to salvage something, O’Reilly invited O’Brien to lunch before a rugby match, at his home in Fitzwilliam Square. It did not go well — and on leaving O’Brien declined to take a book O’Reilly proffered as a parting gift.

In 2009, under severe financial pressure and with O’Brien having a 25pc interest in INM and the backing of other powerful interests, Tony O’Reilly reluctantly stepped down. It was all over, although O’Brien later took a huge loss when he sold it to Mediahuis.

He was separated in the late 1980s and later divorced from his first wife Susan. Within a few years of the breakup, in 1991, O’Reilly married shipping heiress Chryss Goulandris.

With a fortune estimated at £500m, he presented her with a $2.5m engagement ring that Aristotle Onasis had bought for Jackie Kennedy. He also amused and enraged certain sections of the chattering classes by paying over $2m for a Monet painting to hang on the wall at Castlemartin.

The couple shared an interest in bloodstock and horse-racing and enjoyed a busy social life between their various homes until the collapse of his business interests. This also took a toll on his family relationships.

The banks then began closing in on O’Reilly over his indebtedness, sharply dividing Irish society among those who believed in “live by the sword, die by the sword” and those who thought his enormous good work and his international reputation, was cruelly trampled on, by greedy bankers who once lionised him.

It was also believed that the banks were trying to squeeze his wife Chryss for the funds her husband could no longer stump up and after much negotiations she called a halt and he went into bankruptcy in Bermuda. For such a gregarious and powerful man, it was a keenly felt come-down. He no longer made public appearances and seemed to lose touch with friends. His world shrunk further with the sudden death, at the age of 73, of his wife Chryss in 2023.

In many ways, the rise and fall of Tony O’Reilly was a cautionary tale. From relatively humble beginnings he built a business empire — but along the way became a dominating patriarch, too fond of listening to those who told him what he wanted to hear. He made bad business decisions, some of them for sound patriotic reasons, and was too slow to close some of the businesses that were draining him of cash.

Although some people felt he was a puppet-master at INM, targeting individuals (especially other Irish millionaires) and politicians he disliked, most people who worked there believed there was little or no political interference — or if there was, it was successfully channelled through his editors.

At one board meeting it was proposed that the Keane Edge column in this newspaper be banned from writing about the directors of INM and their families. The idea was vetoed by O’Reilly as unacceptable in a free press.

On the other hand, the championing of Atlantic Resources’ oil find off the Irish coast by newspapers in the Independent group left a sour taste for many when the share price collapsed.

A lot of people — including some of O’Reilly’s close friends — lost a lot of money because they believed in the hype and held on too long.

It was also believed that the Irish Independent headline “It’s payback time”, supporting Bertie Ahern and Fianna Fáil on the eve of a general election, was orchestrated by O’Reilly because of his dislike for the Rainbow Coalition. The paper’s editor, Vinnie Doyle, always vehemently denied this.

Tony O’Reilly left behind an impressive sporting legacy. He also endowed public buildings in Trinity, UCD and DCU. His real legacy is in the funding provided by the Ireland Funds which helped to pave the way for the peace process and the Ireland we have today.

Tony O’Reilly is survived by his children: Susan (Wildman), Cameron, Justine, Gavin, Caroline (Dempsey) and Tony Jnr — the last three being triplets.