He was the epitome of the global tycoon, a billionaire owner of newspapers, mines and hotels ...then he lost it all
The remarkable rise and fall of businessman Anthony O’Reilly whose urbane charm opened doors around the world
NO Irish businessman quite caught the imagination of the Irish public in the last century as Anthony Joseph Francis O’Reilly did. He excelled at rugby for Ireland and regularly is ranked in the Top 10 of all the players who ever donned the green shirt. His sporting prowess and rugged good looks saw him audition for the role of Judah Ben-Hur, one that eventually went to Charlton Heston.
In his thirties, he launched Kerrygold as an umbrella brand for all Irish butter exports and in doing so created a global behemoth, the first Irish food product to achieve annual sales in excess of €1bn.
Headhunted by the giant HJ Heinz Company to run its operations in the UK, he rose up the ranks to become CEO and chairman – the first non-Heinz family member to fill the latter role.
At home in Ireland, for years he controlled almost 60% of the national and regional Irish print journalism market through his titles in Independent Newspapers, later Independent News and Media, which in total owned almost 200 newspapers here in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK, before he lost control of the company to Denis O’Brien in a bitter battle.
His investment vehicle bought stakes in mining and oil exploration companies, tableware giant Waterford Wedgwood and some of the most famous hotels in Ireland, including Ashford and Dromoland Castles.
In 1991, his combined salary, bonuses and stock options totalled
‘I never really felt I left Ireland, certainly not emotionally’
$75m, equivalent to €160m in today’s money and made him the highest-paid executive in the United States that year.
For his charity work, especially as chairman of the Ireland Funds, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2001 and, unlike many Irish who receive honorary gongs, he was able to use the title in its substantive form because he was born before 1949 and technically a British subject before the declaration of the republic ended that legal anomaly.
His lifestyle was lavish. He owned Castlemartin, a magnificent mansion in Co. Kildare, a townhouse on Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Square and a holiday retreat in Glandore in West Cork. He had six houses in the exclusive gated community of Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. His home in Fox Chapel, near Heinz headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, sat on seven acres and had 34 rooms, a swimming pool, tennis courts, Japanese and English gardens, and an Irish pub in the basement and was sold in 2000 when he returned to Ireland for good.
With his second wife, Greek shipping heiress Chryss Goulandris, he lived in a château near Deauville, Normandy, though ultimately all but his French property went under the hammer when a reversal of his fortunes saw him declared bankrupt by a Bahamian court in 2015, a process he only exited in January of this year.
For decades, Tony O’Reilly was the epitome of a jet-setting lifestyle, legendary for scheduling meetings all over the world with clockwork precision. Equally at home in the society columns, the sports pages and the business sections, he had a strong sense of dress, famous for always wearing Prince of Wales check suits teamed with powder blue shirts with contrasting white collars, a fashion fad he long outlived but with which he happily persisted as a badge of personal style.
For a man who counted US presidents (he played tennis with George W Bush), prime ministers and business titans among his personal friends, his origins were humble. The one thing that propelled him to the fore, besides his clear business acumen, was agreed on by all – he was urbane and he had charm, an immeasurable but hugely important asset.
But nor was he immune from vanity and there was much derision in 1988 when one of his own newspapers, the Sunday Independent, printed an eight-page colour supplement featuring photographs of him with former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, then UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and president of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe, and also with his then wife Susan Cameron and their six children.
At a time of high taxes, swingeing cutbacks, and mass emigration, it was perceived as somehow boastful when modesty might have been a better strategy.
Throughout his entire career, though, his love for Ireland never was in doubt. Also in 1988, in an interview in the New York Times, he said: ‘I never really felt I left Ireland, certainly not emotionally. I feel a sense of loyalty, commitment and, indeed, debt to Ireland.’
Tony O’Reilly was born in Dublin on May 7, 1936 and grew up on Griffith Avenue, the only child of civil servant John O’Reilly and Aileen O’Connor. John was separated and already the father of four children by that marriage, a fact he confessed to his son only many years later. As it happened, a Jesuit priest had informed Tony of this when he was 15, but the boy chose to say nothing.
From age six, he attended the Jesuit Belvedere College, where one of the priests, Fr Ó hAodh, later taught Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Ever the one to exploit a connection, O’Reilly years later convinced Mugabe to allow Heinz build large bean and soda plants in that southern African country.
A sports prodigy, he played soccer for Home Farm and won competitions in cricket and tennis. He received good reviews for school drama productions and was an altar server, before studying law in UCD, then based in Earlsfort Terrace, coming third in the country in the intermediate exams in 1958.
He never worked as a solicitor (though he later was chairman of law firm Matheson, or Matheson Ormsby Prentice as it was known at the time), deciding instead to pursue a PhD in agricultural marketing from the University of Bradford, after which he insisted on being referred to as Dr O’Reilly all his life, until he gained his knighthood.
He played rugby for Ireland 29 times over the course of 15 years, being first capped at only 18. He toured with the British Lions twice, in 1955 in South Africa and in 1959 in Australia and New Zealand (the team became known as the British and Irish Lions only in 2001) and he still holds the record for the highest number of tries scored in two tours, at 38 in total.
It was during the trip to Australia that he met pianist Susan Cameron,
daughter of a wealthy mining magnate. She later moved to London and they married in 1962 and had six children – Susan, now Susan Wildman and a pilot; Anthony Cameron O’Reilly, known as Cameron; lawyer Justine O’Reilly; and triplets Gavin, Caroline (now Dempsey) and St John Anthony, known as Tony Jr. All the boys became involved in family businesses, while Caroline is a full-time homemaker.
In 1994, Gavin married the model and actress Alison Doody, who starred as Nazi treasure hunter Elsa Schneider in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, though the couple were divorced in 2006.
Tony Sr and Susan separated in the late 1980s, whereupon she moved to London. She died in 2014.
In New York he met Chryss Goulandris, sister of his business associate Peter Goulandris. They had a shared love of horses, with both owning stud farms (O’Reilly once sold one of his horses to Britain’s Princess Anne) and they got married in the Bahamas in 1991. Jointly, they bought the four-storey No.2 Fitzwilliam Square, once the home of William Dargan, who built many of Ireland’s railways.
Earlier, O’Reilly had bought Shorecliffe in Glandore from the elderly Danish woman who had run it as a guesthouse and where he had stayed many times. She gave him first option to buy it and he did, on condition that she remain living there as his housekeeper, a happy arrangement for both. He was known for his loyalty to his staff too and kept the same personal assistant, Olive, and chauffeur, Arthur, for decades.
His last home, the Château des Ducs de Normandie in Bonnevillesur-Touques
He played rugby for Ireland 29 times over the course of 15 years
near Deauville, sits on the site of earlier castles build for the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne and later William the Conqueror, who invaded Britain to win the Battle of Hastings in 1066, becoming king until his death in 1087.
O’Reilly’s media empire began in 1973, when he bought out the descendants of 1913 Lockout antagonist William Martin Murphy, who founded the papers, for £2.1m. The family owned 100% of the voting shares, but just four per cent of the equity. In a genius deal, O’Reilly succeeded in having all equity shares treated as equal and soon owned some 30% of Independent Newspapers, worth £19m two decades later.
He was known for mostly keeping his distance from the editorial side of the newspapers, though since his views on many subjects were wellknown, they surely were at least reflected, if not exactly imposed. A constitutional nationalist who believed in reunification of Ireland by peaceful means, he abhorred the violent campaigns of northern paramilitaries on both sides.
As former chief executive Liam Healy told journalist Nicholas Coleridge: ‘Dr O’Reilly is a not a minute details man. He’s more the type that likes to be informed in a general way. He has this great business capacity for getting to the bottom of things through discussion. He doesn’t like surprises. Not at any level. Everything has to be foreseen and discussed.’
For his own part, O’Reilly claimed he liked to leave his editors to do their jobs. ‘I don’t think it would be fair on me and it certainly isn’t fair on them, to feel that level of expectation,’ he said. ‘It’s not possible for me in the job I have, running a huge world corporation like Heinz, to give them the measured judgement they require. You’d become capricious and there’s enough of those around!’
He did confess to Coleridge that the card of one journalist was marked when the Provisional IRA broke a Christmas truce. The Irish Times headline said ‘IRA break truce’, but the headline in the Irish Independent was ‘“We fight on,” say Provos’.
‘I think from then on, I felt early retirement was staring him in the face,’ O’Reilly said.
For all his business successes, even in his prime years, Tony O’Reilly also tasted failure. He and the Goulandris family injected hundreds of millions into the Waterford Crystal, Wedgwood and Royal Doulton brands, but much of the company went into receivership in 2009 and the manufacturing of one the country’s flagship brands moved overseas. There were mixed results for the oil exploration firm, Providence Resources and the Arcon mining company.
The biggest calamity, though, was when Denis O’Brien, at the time the richest man in Ireland, started buying shares in Independent News and Media, building a 29.9% stake and threatening the dominance of Tony O’Reilly, also at one time the richest man in Ireland, and whose family shareholding
‘He doesn’t like surprises. Not at any level’
was diluted to 13%. As was the case in many legacy media organisations heavily invested in print journalism, advertising revenues diminished as budgets switched to digital and the INM share price dropped. In 2009, O’Reilly resigned as CEO and the role passed to his son, Gavin, while the other brothers were non-executive directors.
The men had been competitive since O’Reilly beat O’Brien for control of Eircom, before that business was sold again. To many observers, the battle for the papers had no business logic behind it. O’Brien is believed to have lost hundreds of millions in his ultimately successful battle to gain control of INM, before later selling it to the DutchBelgian company Mediahuis in 2019 for a modest €145.6m.
In the meantime, Sir Tony O’Reilly faced bankruptcy in the Bahamas, which was opposed by some Irish creditors, including AIB. One by one, his prized possessions were auctioned off, including the contents of Castlemartin, which went under the hammer in a pub after the house itself was sold to American millionaire John Malone for €28m, to pay off the AIB debt of €22.6m. An antique table at which Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela had once dined and its set of chairs, went for €78,000. The highest bid, €145,000, was for two 18th century gilt console tables. Of the taxidermy on offer, a snarling tiger’s head sold for €1,000.
It was a sad end to the sparkling life of the rugby international who could outrun anyone on the wing in his younger years, but lost pace when a younger rival arrived the scene and ran away with the ball. But for a good 30 years, Sir Tony O’Reilly was untouchable, a business and media legend who was a force for the soft power of Ireland in the boardrooms of corporate American and beyond.
Tony O’Reilly died last night aged 88 at St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, surrounded by his family.