‘Golden boy’ of Irish commerce made his name as a rugby star before Heinz and Independent News and Media brought him wealth and power beyond any contemporaryIn his final public appearance after decades of business acclaim and vast wealth came to an abrupt halt with bankruptcy,spoke about success and failure. “You win and you lose, and if you don’t know how to lose you don’t know how to live,” he told a Dublin audience., was very often a spectacular winner.
O’Reilly was the winner when he and O’Brien clashed again in 2001 in the takeover battle for Eircom. O’Reilly’s €2.9 billion bid for the former national telephone monopoly was backed by Goldman Sachs bank and George Soros, the billionaire financier. The government changed the law to smooth the O’Reilly deal, amending tax rules in favour of the union-backed worker share ownership trust in Eircom which stood to increase its stake under his proposal.
O’Reilly – and investors who backed him – had known expensive failures before. Shareholders in his 1980s energy exploration company Atlantic Resources lost out badly in fruitless drilling off the Irish coast that yielded nothing but a “puddle of oil”. Still, there had been little to call into question his wealth in a fundamental way.
The seeds of O’Reilly’s financial implosion were varied. But the demise of Waterford Wedgwood was crippling, sapping huge volumes of money before it went into receivership in the early days of 2009. O’Reilly and his brother-in-law Peter Goulandris ploughed hundreds of millions of euro into the doomed luxury goods group, a catastrophic bet on cut glass and bone china that left him in peril as INM woes intensified.
He was the recipient of videotaped 50th birthday greetings from US president Ronald Reagan and played tennis at the White House with Reagan’s successor, George Bush snr. Anthony John Francis O’Reilly was born on May 7th, 1936, in Dublin to Aileen O’Connor and Jack O’Reilly, a customs official who was a separated father of four children. He grew up in Griffith Avenue, Dublin, and was educated by the Jesuits at Belvedere College.
O’Reilly quickly made his mark at the highest level of the sport, scoring a try in his first Lions test match and becoming the top scorer of the tour. He excelled again when the Lions toured Australia and New Zealand in 1959. He held the Lions record for scoring the most tries – 37. He won 29 Irish caps, his final international match in 1970 coming after a seven-year gap.
“One thing that stood out was his ability to relate at a personal level,” said an associate. “Notwithstanding meeting who’s who – and what’s what – he genuinely seemed to interested in you personally.” BusinessWeek ran a biting cover piece reporting investors heavily critical of a board stuffed with ageing cronies of the chief executive, charges similar to those levelled against the INM and Waterford boards in Ireland. The magazine highlighted ritzy corporate entertainment for a Heinz-sponsored horse race in Leopardstown, all at a time when the company was eliminating 2,500 jobs.
After his 1990 divorce from Susan O’Reilly, this was the period of his second marriage to Chryss Goulandris, heiress to a huge Greek shipping fortune and the owner of big bloodstock interests. She grew up in New York, where her family had a mansion on Park Avenue. They married in the Bahamas in 1991. O’Reilly later gifted to his second wife the diamond engagement ring that Aristotle Onassis gave Jacqueline Kennedy, bidding $2.59 million to buy it in a Sotheby’s auction.
More controversial but shorter-lived was a stake O’Reilly took in the Irish Press publisher, Independent’s historic arch-rival, months before its 1995 collapse. The Competition Authority said Independent’s investment in the group established byIndependent also jointly published the Irish edition of the tabloid Star and, later, acquired the Belfast Telegraph.
Media ownership gave O’Reilly proximity to power, which he relished. “Since I own 35 per cent of the newspapers in Ireland I have close contact with the politicians,” he told Forbes in the 1980s. Notable too was the partisanship of the notorious “Payback Time” front-page editorial in the Irish Independent on the eve of the 1997 general election. Backing Fianna Fáil, the editorial savaged the outgoing Fine Gael-led rainbow coalition.
Bruton told the tribunal he would have taken the reference to the loss of INM “as friends” to mean hostile coverage of the government parties in the newspapers, and not a threat of litigation. This was the opposite of O’Reilly’s account. The potential loss of INM “as friends” referred to prospective litigation over the TV issue and not at all an editorial matter, O’Reilly told the tribunal.