Boost your own wealth by studying the rich list
…even if you can’t stand pharma, dull but lucrative payment systems – or sheep guts
We’d all like to be rich – but how do we go about acquiring wealth? Tomorrow’s Rich List programme on RTE 1 tells us not only who the wealthy are and how they are doing but also gives us some useful money-making tips.
We don’t need a ‘spoiler alert’ to tell you that 2020 was all about Covid. Any business involved in hotels, nightclubs took a right pasting. Hence, don’t be surprised to see Irish Ferries Eamonn Rothwell, Cathal Jackson of Copper Face Jacks fame and cinema kingpins the Ward family slip down the list.
On the up are those in pharma, software and technology, especially the Collison brothers, whose wealth exploded this year by many billions thanks to soaring demand for online payments system Stripe.
Was it enough to eclipse Ireland’s Old Money – you’ll have to wait to find out!
As a contributor to the programme, it was fascinating to examine not only who the richest Irish people were but how they made their money.
There may be controversies about how some people became rich but it surely says something positive that the vast majority on the list were not ‘born with a silver spoon’ in their mouths.
John and Patrick Collison’s parents were a microbiologist and an electrical engineer who also ran a hotel and restaurant.
The brothers went to the local Gaelscoil in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, and then Castletroy College in Limerick, the type of school where most of us did our ‘Leaving’.
Anne Heraty, who has made almost €170m in recruitment, grew up in Ballinalee, Co. Longford, one of six children on a family farm that also included a small shop. In an interview she said everyone pitched in on the busy family business.
Bill Durkan was a plasterer from Bohola, Co. Mayo, who had to emigrate to the UK during the ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ era. He made €142m in construction, including the prestigious conversion of the Royal Military Academy into homes.
We may not all get anywhere near being on the Rich List but we can pick up some tips on adding to our wealth from the programme thanks to an advance ‘peak’ the producers have given us. Hard work is a key ingredient to growing wealth, of
course, but we all know fine people who worked their ‘fingers to the bone’ without making much money. It’s disrespectful to them to repeat the capitalist cliché that anyone can make it rich by working hard… or, heaven help us, ‘following their dream’.
Ask the hordes of musicians and entertainers thrown on the scrapheap during Covid-19 lockdowns – who earned little enough beforehand. Singer Mary Coughlan, one of the bestknown in Ireland, made an appeal for help for her industry last year, revealing recently that she earned little more than €200 a week and gets less than €30k a year on average. Needless to say neither Mary nor any of her musician colleagues are on the Rich List, where living out a glamourous dream is not necessarily a prerequisite for being wealthy.
I’m pretty sure Larry Goodman didn’t dream about selling sheep guts (his first business success) when he was a boy. Nor did Heraty fantasise about recruitment contracts. In a rare interview she admitted: ‘I didn’t really know what I wanted to do… Except for setting up a business.’
And despite its funky name and youthful creators, even Stripe isn’t that exciting. It’s just a payments system. Entrepreneurs dream of being entrepreneurs and seek out the most profitable route appropriate to their skills. Even if you can’t stand sheep guts and have no plans to be a new Anne Heraty, there’s still plenty ordinary folk can learn about wealth and the society we live in from studying the rich.