Tony O Reilly- Balls, Beans, Billions, Bankruptcy and Brilliance

[00:00:15] Welcome to today's episode titled Tony O Reilly- Balls, Beans, Billions, Bankruptcy and Brilliance and this is a story of I would say one of the most remarkable and probably overall talented people were ever likely to cover because Tony O Reilly he was a rugby superstar who'd go on to lead Heinz for 20 years

[00:00:42] he had become one of the highest paid and most successful CEOs during that time while at the same time he was building a media and business empire on the other side of the ocean he was a guy who charmed and mixed with the global and political elite he became Ireland's first billionaire and then he lost it all it is a remarkable story enjoy today we're talking about Tony O Reilly

[00:01:11] and this was your pick so how do you pick him or why um well I guess anybody but any well I should say anybody of our generation I suppose so so born in the 70s so spoiler um would have uh an awareness of Tony O Reilly if he had any interest in business he was a very prominent figure and sort of a source of of inspiration for for a lot of Irish people with any interest in business then when I went to

[00:01:39] college obviously there was the big O Reilly hall in UCD uh University College Dublin which was built he just seemed to be a constant source of and a presence and an inspiration to a lot of people who are in any way business minded and I think his origin story and his sporting prowess probably added to that mystique so uh yeah just a source of inspiration I suppose to a lot of people he was I mean yeah as you said anybody who grew up in Ireland in the 70s would have been aware

[00:02:08] of O Reilly and he was nearly like Irish royalty especially in the business world because he'd be over in America and he didn't move back from America he worked with Heinz up until the the late 90s so his visits to Ireland were like covered and it was like oh Tony O Reilly is back in Ireland and he was the preeminent businessman he was Ireland's first billionaire of course as well um and I knew

[00:02:34] all about that and I just I was surprised that I never actually thought we got to do a story on him because when we did the research on him like he was this polymath he was far more um impressive than I had given him credit for because of course I was young when when he was in his you know heyday youngish and yeah his story is fascinating it really is now I'd read a couple of books I'd read

[00:03:02] Matt Cooper's book on him and I'd read um a book which actually was given to me it was called O'Reilly O'Reilly was that by Ivan or Ivor something yeah yeah um which for some reason wasn't a particularly easy to find book yeah um so it didn't break through for you know I I can only speculate you know but a very influential guy and there was maybe elements to the to the book that perhaps he wasn't

[00:03:29] that keen to share publicly at the time yeah um but uh some great stories you know fantastic character so yeah an inspiration for a lot of people and a small anecdote on my behalf um when they were building the O'Reilly building in in UCD I was a student in there and I was in um getting a tutorial there was six or seven of us in in the room and the tutor is a bit of a lefty you know

[00:03:55] he was a this is terrible it's capitalism writ large and they're buying their way into sort of history building this building and I said that's my uncle Tony like because of course my um so the guy just blanched he went completely white anyway oh oh jesus don't I didn't really mean that you know so uh so I just laughed and uh I don't think I got a good mark off him and just to clarify

[00:04:23] for our listeners Keith is not Tony no but okay let's let's get into him because it's a fascinating story for and again just to to emphasize of all the business people we've covered I think Keith and of all the business people we're going to cover I don't think any of them has been so talented in so many different fields than O'Reilly because this is the story O'Reilly's story includes sport

[00:04:52] business a personality a charisma everything about him was not larger than life it was impressive like he was hugely impressive so we'll start off we'll get into all the impressive things about Tony O'Reilly and the things that probably weren't so impressive about him as well he was born in 1936 in Dublin to his father's father was John Riley and his mother was Aileen O'Connor his father had to change his name

[00:05:21] to O'Reilly when he entered the civil service because unbeknownst to young Tony his father had another family down in Wicklow four kids that he left to be with Tony's mother Tony and his mother John O'Reilly and Aileen O'Connor actually didn't get married till I think late into their 70s because divorce wasn't legal in Ireland back in those days so Tony grew up oblivious thinking he had a mother

[00:05:48] and father and that was about this and they were married and a happy couple and it wasn't until he was 15 that he was in Belvedere this prestigious Jesuit school in Dublin that a priest called him in yeah brought him in and told him at 15 years old that actually you know your father has another family and you've got four half brothers and sisters living down in Wicklow and of course it was a huge shock to the system because not only did this mean that O'Reilly realized that his family had

[00:06:17] been living a lie and he actually didn't confront his parents about this at that time but it also meant that O'Reilly himself was an illegitimate child and back in the mid 20th century in Ireland being an illegitimate child was huge stigma like wasn't it it was a big stain and I think what you're seeing there is that sort of the influence of the Catholic Church as well so so that had a huge sort of impact on a presence in in all of our lives really back then oh yeah

[00:06:46] right up until the 80s I mean illegitimate children not only was there discrimination against them in so many ways there was like they couldn't inherit anything there was social exclusion it really was just a stain nearly on your character it was really bad stuff but that was as you said that was the power of the Catholic Church and I I listened to an awful lot of podcasts and read an awful lot of research where people said that this idea that he was a secret child fueled his ambition you know I

[00:07:15] don't think it's that simple you know I don't either it almost suggests that every illegitimate child became massively ambitious and successful Matt Cooper made a very good point that it did there was a sense of insecurity about O'Reilly that he always needed to be accepted and that he always had to be better and richer and there was this outward confidence and not bravado but that there was this inner insecurity you know yourself the people who kind of brag the most and are most outgoing like

[00:07:44] that usually are the most insecure so there was this inner insecurity but I don't think you can point to it and say that's why he became the person no and I think think Cooper actually called him the the name of his book is the maximalist because you have to be the biggest and best at everything everything had to be sort of turned up to the max but I think Cooper also talks about the relationship Tony's relationship with his mother and his mother was his biggest sort of champion and his biggest

[00:08:09] source of confidence and and self-belief so try try not to veer in these episodes too much into sort of pop psychology but I think undoubtedly it's a driving factor there as well it is isn't it because when we did it'd be interesting to see the impact of mothers on successful businessmen because when we did the Jack Welch thing as well and I don't know if we released that was yes it was his mother and her the confidence that she instilled in him that was his driving force not only confidence but also the

[00:08:37] discipline and the scolding that she used give him as well was the driving influence behind him and he would always have pointed to that so mothers seem to have a big impact on these successful businessmen the Irish mammy in nearly both cases yeah you know yeah that's true that's not talk about the Irish mammy too much so yeah what happened to us then we'd Irish mothers the wooden spoon

[00:09:03] but anyway so from a very early age O'Reilly really was outstanding in every way he went to Belvedere college he excelled in rugby and we're going to talk briefly about his rugby career but he excelled in cricket in tennis academically he was top of the class but also a gifted performer starring in Gilbert and O'Sullivan operas so this guy was an all-rounder and he went down to UCD got a law degree

[00:09:31] but before we get into his business career because his business career started around the age of 26 at the age of 18 he was picked for the Irish rugby team so he was the youngest Irish rugby international at that time and for people in America who maybe don't follow rugby or in other countries who don't follow rugby O'Reilly was what was called a back he played on the wing they're sort of the guys who do an awful lot of the running but they also have to do an awful lot of defending but they're usually the

[00:10:00] guys who score most of the tries and he was this six foot two um 15 stone red-headed very good-looking fella the English press I found a clip they called him the red-headed pin-up boy of Irish rugby so very much a star he played for 15 years for Ireland earning 29 caps and scored 12 tries but he really made his name when he got picked for the Irish and British lines and again for people who aren't aware

[00:10:27] of rugby the Irish and British lines are a team that are put together once every four years and they comprise of the very best players from Ireland England Scotland Wales and every four years they go on to the southern hemisphere country so it'll be rotated they'll go to South Africa do a tour and four years later then they'll go to New Zealand and then four years later they'll go to Australia although I think in O'Reilly's time they combined Australia and New Zealand as the one tour but his stats Keith

[00:10:54] as a somebody who loves rugby his stats are amazing first of all he's been the youngest player ever to be picked for an Irish and Lions uh British and Lions uh team he was only 18 when he was picked in South Africa he scored 16 tries in 15 matches then in the next tour in Australia and New Zealand he scored 22 tries in 23 games he has the record for the most tries than any other British and Irish

[00:11:20] lines in history and to put that in perspective he scored a try literally every game Ireland's best rugby player and one of the world's best rugby players of the last 20 years has been Brian O'Driscoll scored 46 tries in 133 games so O'Reilly's scoring record was unbelievable like off the chart but it wasn't just on the field Keith as well there's some really good anecdotes about how even as just an 18

[00:11:47] year old and then a 23 year old on these tours he really cemented his reputation as being the most charismatic the most outgoing the guy in the changing room who had everybody laughing because he could do really good mimics he could tell great stories but also and Matt Cooper spoke about this in one of the podcasts I listened to it wasn't just he had an intelligence but it wasn't just an intelligence

[00:12:14] to retain facts figures and names which he could Matt Cooper said he had an amazing capacity to retain information he also had this really deep intellectual curiosity as well and Sid Miller who toured with him in the British Irish lines has this story about a reception they were at he said we were at a reception and the Prime Minister of New Zealand was there having just announced the budgets O'Reilly had him in a corner

[00:12:39] and after a while we saw the Prime Minister nodding his head O'Reilly was telling him where he'd gone wrong in the budget O'Reilly was only 23 at the time you know so he had this huge intellect charisma everything about him but before we leave the rugby career because rugby is really my my girl my love I

[00:13:03] suppose but he did retire from rugby at the age of 26 to uh to go into business but he was called back unexpectedly at the age of 33 because one of the Irish players had got injured and they were playing England in Twickenham and so they called up O'Reilly and asked him to fill in and now O'Reilly by this stage has spent six or seven years in the boardroom and at business lunches so he put on a few pounds and Willie John McBride described him in training the day before the game and he said O'Reilly's cheeks

[00:13:31] were wobbling around like jelly the sweat running down his face like droplets of water on the outside of a window and at the training uh O'Reilly said to McBride that he was a bit worried that the English winger would run rings around him and McBride came back with I wouldn't worry too much Tony by the time he runs around you he's going to be bloody tired and these are stories as well that O'Reilly would tell himself he was well able to take the piss out of himself didn't he show up to training on a

[00:14:00] Rolls Royce he did and apparently there was a story as well that during the game one of the English and one of the Irish supporters shouted you might as well give his chauffeur a kick in the head while you're at it amazing but he made a lot of connections even at that early stage as well I mean you can almost look at the South African experience he started to build connections down there and that became an

[00:14:29] important part of the pillar in his own sort of personal business as well further down there you can tie them very much to the the lines tours because if you look and we'll talk about his media empire later he built a media empire in Ireland New Zealand Australia and South Africa so the three southern Asian countries that the British and Irish lines toured is where he built his media empire so obviously using his reputation and his connections there to uh to build the empire but um but after that

[00:14:59] tour Keith because he had this huge personality he did consider briefly going into a broadcasting career and there's another yeah there's another nice anecdote that when he came back from one of the tours he went into RTE to uh screen test and while he was doing his screen test Terry Wogan now some of these stories you don't know how true they are because Tony O'Reilly was very good at telling a good yarn himself but

[00:15:25] apparently in one of the other studios looking on while he was doing his screen test was Terry Wogan and Gabe Byrne they were very young at the time now for listeners who don't know Terry Wogan went on to become the the face and the voice of BBC for decades Gabe Byrne went on to become the face and the voice of RTE the Irish broadcaster for decades so these became the two pre-eminent broadcasters in Britain and Ireland for decades but they were looking on at Tony O'Reilly and Wogan turned to O'Brien and said

[00:15:54] we're screwed if O'Reilly moves into broadcasting so impressed apparently were they by O'Reilly's ability but of course he didn't get into to broadcasting um yeah he would have been great in politics as well I mean the world was his oyster really it was he was this polymath he could turn his hand at everything but he got into business anyway and he very quickly he started off I think

[00:16:19] as a business consultant then he moved down to Cork and worked for an agriculture plant company but at just the age of 26 the Irish dairy board brought him on board as general manager and that's really where his career started because pretty quickly uh after he came on board he was behind the launch of Kerrygold butter and even to this day Kerrygold is a billion dollar a year brand it's one of the top

[00:16:45] butter brands in the world but he's a fantastic marketing person really really good he said we weren't selling butter we were selling Ireland's green fields and Kerrygold became a huge instant success within a few years Keith it was accounted for 10 percent of Ireland's exports just one product now I know back in the 60s Ireland's exports weren't huge but for one single product not one company but for one

[00:17:12] product to account for 10 percent of your exports and butter at that stage was sort of an unbranded yes yeah commodity in a way that's this that's it and he very focused on the marketing he wanted to start to promote Ireland's lush grass-fed dairy farming tradition and that all fit into the butter and it was a more expensive butter than other but and it still is yes but uh you know he was a fantastic

[00:17:36] uh marketeer and so on the back of that then he was hired to become managing director of Irish Sugar and Irish Sugar had this food division called Air and Foods yeah which is still around and that was struggling at the time and to help it out um O'Reilly decided to do a strategic partnership with Heinz and while that partnership nothing really came of that partnership of course once

[00:18:02] O'Reilly entered Heinz's orbit I'm sure as soon as he entered anybody's orbit they could see the potential and they thought we want this guy and they offered him the UK managing director job of Heinz and at the same time you mentioned politics at that same time the Irish government offered him the job of minister for agriculture so he had a choice and he could have gotten into politics and I don't think politics would have suited him you know and I think he made the right choice but he would have been well

[00:18:32] able as a politician but Ireland had too small a sphere for him I keep thinking about that famous quote um politics is show business for ugly people he was too good looking it's probably too good looking to be a politician yeah but also I think he wanted his talents and ambition needed an international stage and I just don't think Ireland was big enough for his ambition so he took the the Heinz role in the UK and like straight away

[00:19:00] he just made a huge impact within two years of being there he closed outdated factories expanded the pet food market boosted their baked beans market and he increased revenue from 30 million in 1969 to 100 million in 1971 wow so huge impact and they say that his strategies that he used in the UK then became the blueprint for Heinz's global expansion and of course then he he's moving up in terms of awareness and his own personal

[00:19:29] brand within the Heinz organization then so very much really put himself on the map oh like if he was doing a good job he'd be left to run the Heinz business in the UK they'd be like okay he's good but they saw they had a superstar in their hands and they thought okay we're bringing him over to America because I could think I think even at that early age they saw this is our future you know he is he is the superstar and so within two years he was brought over to America made senior vice president of North

[00:19:58] American operations and he and his family had to move to Pittsburgh and again he implemented the same strategies he closed down outdated factories he cost dropped by 15 percent I have here and output increased by 30 percent he introduced just-in-time inventory like a frenetic pace of change that he just brought into the company he negotiated landmark union agreements that implemented these staggered shifts

[00:20:25] and he reduced strike incidence rates by 90 percent he increased the pet food business and grew sales by 40 annually and within two years again he increased revenue from 600 million to 950 million uh so really really dynamic loads of change very pragmatic very efficient uh very much the bottom line and then he was

[00:20:51] promoted in 73 to become COO and president just four years after being hired so meteoric and again over the intervening years you could see that they were just grooming him for um to take over because in the six years that he was COO and president he again closed down factories cut headcount but still boosting output he modernized production lines uh the new york times praised his pragmatic leadership and his

[00:21:19] focus on core brands um he bought stuff like weight watchers in 1978 for 71 million because he could see the trends in you know consume health conscious consumers within a few years wealth watchers or weight watchers was bringing in 450 million um so massive massive growth but what was so interesting about this keep this you were mentioning that um that he could see his own brand strategically within

[00:21:46] heinz i think heinz was where he saw his future in terms of corporate america but i also think like heinz's ketchup baked beans yes tins of tuna it's a kind of a boring enough business for somebody as dynamic as him and somebody as dynamic as him i think needed something else outside of heinz and he had something else because we'll get into his irish businesses soon but in the early 70s while he was in america at heinz

[00:22:15] he was also building his own empire over in ireland and he he said this to his bosses he's there's a quote from o'reilly he said i talked to my first boss at heinz and i said i have a business in ireland that i might go back to one day do you mind and his boss said tony let me tell you about america if the price of heinz stock goes up you've got a job if it goes down you'll be back in ireland picking cadavos

[00:22:40] again so now you can you imagine any corporation allowing one of its executives to run a massive empire on the side it just wouldn't happen i think it's testament to the fact that heinz said we're looking at him kind of going well he's exceptional he's going to be our future boss and as long as he's given putting in the results and you know doing what he's doing at heinz he can do whatever the hell he

[00:23:06] likes yeah yeah and i think some of the behavior that you see later on it okay he's in a senior leadership roles in heinz but he's sort of flying back and spending his weekend in irish business and back on a they're holding the plane for him and he's yeah he's and you're like he must have been exhausted he must never have seen his family keith this is the his schedule was five days a week monday to

[00:23:33] friday in heinz right friday flight back to ireland ran his irish businesses for two days saturday saturday and sunday and then flew back to heinz either late on sunday night or earlier monday morning but he was back in the heinz office for monday morning he did this according to matt cooper for 40 weeks of the year for several years loads of years throughout his heinz leadership more or less

[00:23:56] and you're right at that time in the 70s he had a wife and six children yeah they must have never seen him like it must have been extraordinary it's it's crazy and like during this time like at heinz we can you know we talked about the amount of change that was taking place at heinz he was putting in huge hours i'm guessing into heinz and in 1979 he became ceo of heinz at just 43 years of age he later became

[00:24:24] chairman and was the first ever non-heinz family member to lead the company um during his time at heinz he uh grew the market cap from just under i think it was 900 million to 11 billion so 12 fold they entered 17 new markets they acquired companies in china india south africa um he was very very pragmatic

[00:24:48] in in his acquisitions he made a name for himself as what was called a bottom fisher in that he refused to pay more than 12 time earnings for acquisitions and his mo was to cut costs reinvest heavily in marketing and use the savings to boost profits so very careful very pragmatic um and you know a really really good innovator as well and there was lots of innovations keep up one of the innovations

[00:25:15] i like and it's only a small little bit but uh i found it very interesting it was under his watch that the first squeezable bottle of ketchup was introduced wow and this this was a huge game changer for two particular reasons one it's obvious because glass bottles are heavy and fragile so they cost a lot more to transport and they broke so that added to cost but more importantly uh for our younger listeners they mightn't be aware of what it was like to have a glass bottle of ketchup it was hard

[00:25:43] to get the ketchup out and so a parent the last bit yes so a parent had to dispense the ketchup usually okay but when the squeezable bottles came out the children got to dispense the ketchup and when children dispensed the ketchup they put more ketchup on their place so this led to an increase interesting yes this led to an increase in sales as well um so overall he did really well and

[00:26:09] now we will talk about his personality he did have a huge ego uh that was pretty obvious probably hard to see why you wouldn't have an ego yeah yeah if you were that time with that success but the people who worked under him in heinz you know were they spoke very highly of him because he gave them a huge amount of autonomy but he demanded absolute accountability like he was focused on the bottom line i think he had a

[00:26:34] memo where he basically said if you're not growing by 10 percent you're not in the game every year and this is one quote from an executive he said tony is very competitive and his scorecard is the bottom line but he's also motivated by friendship he'll go that extra mile for people so we'll go that extra mile for him so he had huge loyalty and buy-in from the people who work for him now i know when he got to

[00:26:59] independent news and media my impression of the people who worked for him was an awful lot of them were like sycophants you know they even dressed like him yeah yeah with his famous two-tone shirts i remember that for our listeners back in the it was around the 80s or 90s this style of two-tone shirt came in where the collar was white and the shirt was either blue or pinstripe blue and tony loved these shirts and he'd wear it usually with a purple or yellow tie yeah yeah i remember then you'd see

[00:27:29] the independent news and media his media group their agm and every bloody executive on the top of the table was wearing the exact same shirt that's right yeah and and the white white cuffs as well collars and cuffs yeah and they'd have a picture of tony sort of in the paper quite regularly staring into space inspired by the greatest idea but i think we we we should probably loop back in the irish business but just before we do i think it's probably important to put a marker there and say

[00:27:58] you know what what you were saying there was you had a conservative pragmatic grounded set almost sensible growth strategy in heinz yeah and then the irish business seems to be the polar opposite this is what i'm thinking when i was reading this and i was going through it and i was thinking about it it's almost as if if i was using analogy it's like heinz was school time for tony heinz was monday to friday

[00:28:27] it was a pension like yes and my god what a good pension i'll get into his pay in a minute but heinz was school heinz was monday to friday it was kind of boring you talk about ketchup tuna canned soup very boring but of course tony being tony he still excelled at it he was still by far the best at it but it was school so he was very controlled disciplined pragmatic the irish business

[00:28:53] was weekend time and that was where tony let his hair down and he took on huge risks he took the total opposite kind of strategies and he obviously worked hard in the irish's businesses but he didn't use that same pragmatic approach it was the total opposite yeah yeah it's really interesting it's very interesting that uh that contrast between them and we are going into the irish business but just you mentioned to you know heinz was where he you know made a lot of money he made huge amounts of money and and

[00:29:22] this goes back to i suppose when we talked about jack welch jack welch really in the 80s brought in this concept of the superstar ceo where their pay packets were tied to the uh shares of the company and o'reilly was part of this group of superstar ceos in 1992 i think he was the highest paid ceo with 75 million pay package between 96 and 98 he took out 105 million in pay from heinz and you know he

[00:29:50] he he got to the stage now by this stage 96 98 and this is where we'll loop back then to the irish businesses which had been going since the 70s but around 96 98 heinz's growth had kind of begun to plateau and his pay packet was huge forbes had a an article where they said tony o'reilly's ego and paycheck are bigger than his accomplishments and so and he did have a huge ego but shareholder

[00:30:15] frustration over the stagnation he'd be there and in charge for over 20 years so he retired in 1998 from heinz now forbes who had been scathing about his ego they did come out with when he retired and said heinz had the strongest momentum of any food company under tony o'reilly with a 15 annual growth race so you know his reputation and his stewardship of heinz will go down as one of the best in corpus

[00:30:39] america at that time so he did well he did well there but um yeah let's let's talk about his irish business now because that's where the real drama happens yes um so it started in the 1970s as we said while he was in heinz he um and as you said he was like disciplined low risk in heinz in in uh in ireland it was this high stakes risk taker he started with a company called fitzwilliam and

[00:31:08] i think the vogue back then we spoke about it when we talked about barry diller the vogue back in the 70s and 80s was these big conglomerates these holding companies holding companies that is a mishmash like gulf and western a mishmash of every kind of company i kind of go what's the strategy here but obviously i you know what it's a story you'd have to dig into to see what was the strategy behind

[00:31:32] having these big conglomerates but this is o'reilly strategy anyway with fitzwilliam uh they bought textile and manufacturing companies construction companies a fertilizer production wholesale retail company and they were financed by financial engineering and stock market maneuvering and you know o'reilly himself for most of this time up until the time he retired from uh heinz he

[00:31:57] wasn't able to give it his full focus so that obviously i would say had some um impact because in the 70s there was a recession there was soaring interest rates the oil crisis so an awful lot of these businesses that fitzwilliam got involved in got into trouble they were heavily indebted to the banks the banks called in the loans and they had to sell a lot of those businesses i mean that's a quick summary of the fitzwilliam enterprise atlantic resources was another company he got into in the 70s

[00:32:25] um yeah he wanted to be the first person to find oil in ireland because yeah yeah you they had just found oil off the in the north sea and there was huge optimism and enthusiasm for tony o'reilly's company to find oil and atlantic resources within a province it went on until 2019 keith and hundreds of millions invested in this they never really found anything significant at all

[00:32:51] and telecoms as well didn't you dip into a telecom slash tv business um princess holding or yes yes and there was an awful lot of political controversy about that because they had they had antony all around ireland and an awful lot of uh people were bypassing it and he wants the politicians to get involved obviously because they were breaking the law but the politicians didn't really want to get involved because they'd lose votes all politics are local

[00:33:18] this is yeah but i suppose his his big business really that he got involved in in 1973 was independent newspapers which was one of ireland's largest newspaper groups and he rebranded this as independent news and media or inm floated down the irish and london stock exchanges but he held on to 30 percent of it and effectively controlled the board i presume from voting rights and whatever and as you said then yeah it was true his connections in australia south africa new zealand he expanded it

[00:33:47] throughout the 80s and 90s and it was a it was a big big significant media enterprise like at its height it had over 200 newspapers magazines and radio stations it had annual revenues of 1.7 billion but it had a huge huge amount of debt as well and this city like he built his businesses on

[00:34:09] huge debt yeah yeah highly leveraged yeah highly leveraged but for o'reilly hugely profitable business uh like he took out massive dividends out for every year like one year he took out 31 million in dividends he was taking about 14 million on average every year in dividends and i'm sure he had earnings coming from every other place um and i it's a thing that i'd love to dig into keith too um i mean we talk

[00:34:35] about the barclay brothers um buying you know newspaper group rupert murdoch newspapers were ingrained in him he was a bit different but it's a real thing for these business tycoons to want to own media and want to own newspapers now again for younger listeners they'd be like newspapers but like back in the 70s 80s 90s and even well before that newspapers were very profitable they were hugely profitable and also they were this

[00:35:04] ultimate trophy business because they gave you like huge influence and access you know and they allowed you to get in with the the politicians celebrities it it's a it was a really good business to own back then yeah and you'd imagine a lot of people kowtow to you and sought your your approval if you like as the owner of a newspaper i mean there's stories about tony blair for example and and alistair

[00:35:30] campbell hot footing it to murdoch's yacht yes to try try and swing an election you would imagine that's just one probably example that's quite quite prominent oh well i mean there's the story of o'reilly in south africa um he was very friendly with mandela apparently mandela when he first left jail the first holiday he took was to o'reilly's holiday home in the bahamas and then there was a story

[00:35:56] of o'reilly with his business associates down in south africa and they ran into a hurdle when they were trying to take over some south african media um business and o'reilly said i'll be back in a few hours and off he went went to mandela's house sat down had a chat with mandela came back to the office and said it sorted so that's the kind of circles he uh liked to uh be in and you know you can imagine o'reilly

[00:36:24] this um you know charismatic intellectual very outgoing person he thrived in that atmosphere uh i i did an example of that keith i don't know did did matt cooper talk uh a write about uh o'reilly's famous executive advisory board i don't recall that so this was an advisory board

[00:36:47] that o'reilly had for inm and it was basically just a group of very prominent and successful ex-politicians ex-business leaders he had on the board he had brian mulroney the former canadian prime minister henry kissinger uh he even had sean connery the former james bond was on the board and apparently once or twice a year the board would just get together in some

[00:37:14] very exclusive resort it was just a shindig for them to shoot the breeze and for o'reilly to have the people he wanted to hang out with most to go on this big sort of you know i didn't mention that to my recollection but who was advising who like i'd say now i'd say it was o'reilly's court yeah it was it was a platform for o'reilly to hold forth bring all these prominent people together so he could

[00:37:38] regale them with stories and you know uh it would definitely feed into his ego anyway i'd say and pay them to listen to oh yeah yeah that feels a bit weird um and there's the story ronald reagan sent him a video message for his 50th birthday while ronald reagan was president bill clinton was a regular visitor so o'reilly loved this that's why he loved independent news and media it really was his

[00:38:04] his trophy asses uh which makes what we're going to talk about all the more kind of sad the way it all fell apart for him but um one thing um and you'd probably know a good bit about this because we mentioned matt cooper a few times now matt cooper is an irish broadcaster but he uh made his name really as a business journalist who worked for o'reilly's newspapers and then he became editor of a newspaper that was within o'reilly's group but he's a very very much an independent voice he wouldn't

[00:38:34] kowtow to anybody and he wrote the book the maximalist yeah and um the podcast i listened to the guy who was interviewing cooper asked him did o'reilly interfere with any stories because o'reilly had loads of business interests some more that we'll talk about um i'll tell you what cooper said in the podcast and maybe you can uh see if he said anything else in the book so what cooper did say

[00:38:58] was that o'reilly made point of never interfering in individual stories right so if if cooper was writing a story that was harmful or was going to be harmful to one of o'reilly's businesses o'reilly never interfered in that story and he made a point in meetings when people would say you know that's going to be damaging to this business you're in o'reilly would say i'm not interfering because that would give my detractors ammunition to say that i'm interfering editorially right grand and then

[00:39:28] cooper testifies that but cooper also testifies that to the fact that he did interfere in the hiring and firing of journalists in other words when cooper became editor of tribune in his first week one of o'reilly's lackeys came to him with a directive from o'reilly saying fire these three journalists now cooper refused to but there's also plenty of instances where o'reilly would have stacked his

[00:39:53] newspapers with people who would have towed his line politically and o'reilly's politics were not idealistic they were whichever political party aligned with his business interests and there were very very obvious cases of where his newspapers came out either for or against a particular political party during an election campaign and the party that they went for were always the party that aligned with o'reilly's business interests so he did interfere in a macro level most definitely

[00:40:22] interesting so so it's almost a subliminal yeah towing the line with what sir anthony would exactly you don't have to interfere if you've got the right people in place that's interesting what i also think is interesting is was around or or or or what period did he sort of set his sights on um and it sounds so

[00:40:45] quaint at this point but the the second mobile phone network license so this this becomes sort of part of the story result of undoing and crossing swords swords with his with his nemesis so he seems there's a tread in the book where he seems to sense he's entitled to go for and win the the next mobile network

[00:41:09] license yeah um and of course it doesn't go that way no and you can understand in a way maybe why he felt entitled because again for our listeners ireland is a small country o'reilly at this stage you know by the 90s was our we had michael smurfett who's an extremely successful businessman in the paper and packaging

[00:41:33] industry but or smurfett very much kept to that space and didn't you know move outside of his lane as such and he was low profile when you compare him to o'reilly o'reilly was the preeminent businessman and he kind of had this oar about him and the people underneath him as if whatever o'reilly did was right he didn't put a foot wrong by this stage you know so he probably felt well who else is going to

[00:42:01] get this license who else would be able to take on this mobile phone license now of course we shall see that somebody else did take it on and this somebody else then uh proved to be a more difficult opponent than o'reilly had anticipated and we will get on to him but before we get on to him i just want to talk very briefly about he also got involved with aircon oh yeah yeah and and this was another kind of a

[00:42:28] blemish i think against o'reilly because for our listeners aircon is ireland's national telephone business and in 2001 o'reilly got together a consortium together with george sores and other people and they bought aircon for 3.2 billion in a leveraged buyout but again they saddled it with 2.7 billion of debt and instead of what you would have hoped this is now when the internet was just taken off you

[00:42:55] would have hoped that they would have invested money and built ireland's telephone infrastructure as most companies were doing telephone companies were doing at the time but they didn't instead they just slashed infrastructure cost by up to 40 percent took as much money out of it as they could floated the company three years later made a billion pound dollar or euro profits and you know they they had no long-term strategy and why this why i'm pointing this out is because we'll talk in a few minutes as

[00:43:24] well about waterford crystal another business he took over and o'reilly very much made the point of he was doing water crystal and taking it on as much of a patriotic cause because it was such a great brand but he and you can see there's probably a bit of snobbishness in o'reilly here waterford crystal was this premium brand so he had this patriotism and it was an international brand whereas aircon was this national mobile operator and he just thought you know screw it i'm not going to do anything except

[00:43:51] take as much money out as i could and i don't really care what happens to it or to the irish people because this was our national telephone network it felt like naked profiteering really but it was what was that an indication of financial turbulence possibly what did he change his tune was that another pragmatism did he need the money base well i think you you're hitting on a point there that we

[00:44:19] will get into because as early as 2002 forbes wrote an article where he talked about how his businesses weren't making much money and they were in huge debt so he was in trouble financially but i mean how aircon finished up now was that it passed from private equity firm to private equity firm and like when we look at this it was sold like as we said for 3.2 billion in 2001 by 2010 aircon was sold for

[00:44:43] just 40 million it had losses of 486 million and it had a debt of 3.8 billion but i think you're right he probably did it because he needed the money because by this stage he was um i was forbes i've mentioned the forbes article this from 2002 they said so how does o'reilly handle his own investments not quite so deftly a tally of his public holdings a curious assortment of media luxury goods and mining as well

[00:45:10] as high end shares show losses of nearly 924 million on their 1.7 billion market cap and they pointed out that the debt in independent news and media had ballooned to 1.4 billion which is 1.7 times its market value so he was in trouble by this stage yeah yeah you know um and then we do get on to oh yeah there was one other small controversy that happened before we get on to his the big public feud he had with

[00:45:39] dennis o'brien he was given a knighthood in 2001 for his um work with the iron funds his charity with dan rooney from the pittsburgh steelers to put money into northern ireland where they funded integrated schools cross-community initiatives a really good initiative and he was knighted but there was huge backlash in ireland over his knighthood which um i know i i found it surprising one of the papers and i'm guessing it must have been the irish times because it definitely wasn't an irish independent

[00:46:05] newspaper said a knighthood for peace building yes a knighthood for an irish man unsettling you know i know people in the north would definitely have an issue with it but like i looked at this bob geldoff accepted i was just about to say sir bob yeah 15 years earlier in 1986 so i'm thinking that bob geldoff can accept the knighthood let o'reilly take a knighthood if he wants but there was huge

[00:46:31] controversy around it at the time yeah it seemed like a manufactured controversy to me i think so i think so but then we get on to i suppose the big public feud and you know dennis o'brien from your dealings in the you know uh internet and you're involved in the phone business and all that so yeah dennis o'brien is the guy who ultimately comes up against um o'reilly the young pretender really

[00:47:00] wasn't he he was a lot younger than o'reilly at this time yeah he was and i think he was a disrupter and he got he got digital yeah kind of in a way that somebody of o'reilly's sort of vintage maybe perhaps didn't quite get digital yeah and i think maybe that's that's the story here it's like the the

[00:47:23] the epoch changing sort of the old world of publishing and those fancy shirts to the to the street visor street fighting disruptive sort of digital edge sort of business that yeah that that every newspaper had to become really yeah and for our listeners quick background on dennis o'brien he's one of ireland's wealthiest men still he's also one of ireland's most aggressive and litigious businessmen so you have

[00:47:52] be very careful what you say about him you'll notice i'm not saying a lot uh and o'brien made his money by winning this keith mentioned the second mobile phone license o'brien won it in 1995 and again we'll be very careful about what we say here but um he won it under what was later to being found very uh suspicious circumstances now o'brien has never been charged with anything

[00:48:19] okay but there were tribunals that were undertaken by the government in later years to find out what had happened and the tribunals found against o'brien and they found that there were suspicious movements of money between o'brien's companies and the government minister who awarded the second mobile phone license so according to the tribunals again not that dennis o'brien would be listening to our podcast but anyway

[00:48:44] one of his lackeys might uh current tribunals um that they found against o'brien and of course these tribunals were very public and the second phone license o'brien made a ton of money from it i think he cashed out with over 300 million and it set up his fortune he went on to become a billionaire but because of the controversy around these licenses they were widely reported and of course o'brien owned independent news and media so they were the ones who were reporting on this and this really infuriated

[00:49:14] o'brien he thought his name was being dragged through the mud and he was blaming o'reilly for this and he also thought and again as well as this we mentioned the aircom deal that o'reilly won o'brien went against o'reilly for that uh business and he lost and he felt that o'reilly had used independent news and media to influence that process as well and o'brien really isn't the type of guy who

[00:49:41] you know forgets a grudge yeah and he kind of generally tends to try and see that grudge through to the very end which is what happened here he's uh a tough guy he's he's very tough of course he he denies all of the accusations yes from a tribunal perspective and vociferously so so um just to just to just to put that out there yeah yeah but what we'd recommend uh is you know do a bit of googling

[00:50:10] you know look at the findings of the tribunal and make up your own mind yeah exactly but i think the the animosity seems to be fairly deep rooted it goes back to sort of the original awarding of that license there's been other speculation that other events also happened over the course of that that period of time but i think what's interesting is they would have been both very prominent o'brien's a rugby fanatic apparently yes yeah fanatic so i'm sure they must have

[00:50:40] crossed paths yeah and i'm sure there must have been a time where maybe they could have been friends they would have met and they could have been friends but who knows what well i mean lots led to the falling out and i i definitely think that you know independent news and media reporting on the tribunals as they would have i don't know what o'brien expected that they wouldn't report on them yeah you know i i i don't know but he he was very very bitter about it and as a result o'brien quietly started buying

[00:51:09] i and m shares now his reason for doing so you know it's either one or several reasons it was either payback you know he wanted to get back at o'reilly or maybe it was he saw that the independent news and media was a very very good media group and he could control the narrative about his own reputation you know if he owned them or maybe like every other business tycoon throughout the ages he wanted

[00:51:33] this trophy asses or maybe it was a combination of all those three yeah i guess because o'brien also had radio holdings right so he did he had communicor so so he knew news he knew media yeah and he also had a burgeoning sort of private uh internet sort of the series of internet holdings including my former

[00:51:56] alma mater irish jobs that i so yeah i think probably he probably had a sense not not a sense of destiny that's a bit grandiose but he was probably looking at this relic of the old media world thinking you know i i know how to run new media businesses yeah but it turned it like i mean it didn't turn out well for o'reilly as we'll go into but it didn't turn out well for o'brien either so in 2006 he started uh

[00:52:26] buying shares and o'brien initially didn't see him as a threat until o'brien kept on gradually building his shares up and up and up and it led to a kind of reckless costly war at a time when press was starting to go down and down circulation was going down and then you had the 2008 crash while this was going on independent news and media i would i don't know what percentage of the revenues was coming from

[00:52:50] property advertising but a huge percentage of us yeah and overnight i mean for our listeners who experienced the 2008 crash in ireland our whole economy back then was built on property yeah and overnight property just went and it went for four years which means that advertising revenues and independent news and media just went through the floor and at the same time as this we got a circle

[00:53:15] back to another one of o'reilly's huge investments he invested in this company called washford crystal back in 1990 and water crystal had at one stage being this jewel in the crown of irish exports i remember keep growing up in the 80s our only real uh tourism was americans and it was nearly like a pilgrimage for the americans that came over they all went to wash for crystal factory to buy water crystal it was this

[00:53:44] huge prestigious luxury business by the time o'reilly got involved in this in 1990 it wasn't doing as well its costs were high um it was experiencing industrial relation issues um and it had merged with wedgewood the um big ceramics company and wedgewood was kind of propping it up at this stage but o'reilly thought there was great potential to bring it back to his past lorries because he thought it could be you

[00:54:12] know a real symbol of irish excellence he thought he could go into like a cartier or a tiffany type company um yeah of course the world was you know lvmh or whatever they were at that stage this this concept of a luxury sort of stable of brands yeah and you could see the potential and i mean by 2000 it he made progress it was turning over 1.4 billion in in revenue but then in the course of the nautis loads of

[00:54:41] things happened that hurt the company they shifted production to to reduce cost they shifted production over to indonesia and slovenia and of course that diluted the brand's prestige the whole thing was this was handmade in ireland so that wasn't very good you also had a weak us dollar and most of its sales were coming from the us and also a criticism that was made of o'reilly was that instead of investing in innovation because tastes were changing by this stage people were getting more into sort of

[00:55:11] minimalist designs whereas wash crystal was still this heavy cut crystal but o'reilly didn't change with the times again kind of what you were saying there maybe against his battle with dennis o'brien he was still maybe old school and stuck in the old school and instead of investing in innovation he invested in acquisitions and of course this just added more debt debt to wash for crystal and they didn't

[00:55:35] again getting back to what you did didn't they didn't have an online website until 2007 so they were well behind the curve wow and by 2007 their sales were down to 670 million half of what they were in 2000 and then of course again the 2008 crash happened and sure that was the end of it i mean nobody there was no luxury buyers after 2008 and the other thing it's always puzzled me is that

[00:56:01] um and maybe it's just sort of the experience i would have had growing up but waterford crystal was in sort of a in a cupboard or a glass case and you would buy it once yeah yeah you weren't gonna go and buy another one and you you didn't even use it no and it didn't really change and god help you as a kid if you if you went near it like and this is this and it was bought as a wedding present as well

[00:56:27] that was an awful lot of time it was bought as a wedding gift and a wedding gift for a couple back in the 60s as we said there is a lot different to a wedding gift for a couple in the 2000s they didn't want a big heavy piece of cut crystal they wanted a stylish you know piece of glass something a lot different and they just didn't move at the times but the big big tragedy we talk about his debt and you know he took on an awful lot of external debt to finance these companies

[00:56:52] but he personally together with his brother-in-law peter gulandris because by this stage o'reilly married chris gulandris i think sometime in i think it was 1990 or something like that um and she and her brother came from a very wealthy greek shipping family and o'reilly and his brother-in-law personally had put in 540 million into water crystal and it went bust in 2009 it went into receivership

[00:57:19] and what's interesting keith i just looked it up because i thought well what happened it after that well a u.s private equity firm bought it uh in 2009 for 107 million right six years later they sold it to the finnish company fiskars for 437 million and at the same time value there if there was value there and they also took out 66 million in dividends over that time so they got a good deal um but of course

[00:57:45] o'reilly now 2008 crash happens his one of his most prized assets washed for crystal gone and he put a sunk a huge amount of money into it his independent news and media was going through the floor o'brien was kept on piling in buying more shares he had to step down o'reilly as ceo and director in 2009 his son took over the road but he was out in 2005 as o'brien kept on buying shares and ultimately

[00:58:13] o'reilly had to sell all his shares in independent in 2015 um or in 2014 and we get on to the demise but as i said for o'brien it didn't end up well for o'brien either he eventually had to sell ianm and he lost 450 million honest so yeah and i often wonder about the the crystal and why he doubled down that's something i've often been yeah what was it nostalgia was it loyalty to the staff

[00:58:40] um he he he kept investing and investing was it loyalty to a great iconic irish brand it just didn't make much sense to me it didn't because you're right to point it it isn't actually with hindsight that we're saying you know that was a bad move i remember throughout the 2000s when the money was and they were changing managing director every second year to try and bring in a new guy with a new plan and it just seemed to be a mess and you kind of think okay if it's a mess you kind

[00:59:10] of draw back and kind of say well i'm not putting more money in but he kept on piling more money and off his own money as well and as i said it's not with hindsight people at that time were kind of saying this is kind of foolish you know this this is a bad mistake so yeah i don't know what was going on there was it vanity did he think he knew better i don't know or was it loyalty or was it just sort of an emotional investment don't know i mean matt cooper when i was listening on the podcast

[00:59:40] he said that he was very very tied to the water for crystal investment almost from a patriotic viewpoint that he saw this as being an irish brand that could elevate ireland onto the world stage and was that tied into it but you know there does come a time where like as i said he's known for being super super smart not only we talk about his intellectual depth matt cooper also talks about

[01:00:07] his ability to read a spreadsheet and understand spreadsheets and understand finances so even from that point of view he should have been able to look at and say yeah this is bad i don't know that that's a puzzling one it is it is but anyway so you have the crash um you have he loses control of independent news and media which is his trophy like he loses control loses influence that he had his

[01:00:32] trophy asset he also of course lose those lucrative dividends that really wore his his salary for all those years um and it there was a the guy who was interviewing matt cooper he had this really good quote about how you go bankrupt and it's a quote from a an earnest hemingway book where one guy asked another he says how did you go bankrupt two ways mike said gradually and then suddenly and that's how it was for

[01:01:00] o'reilly because by 2008 the writing was on the wall he had debts of he said he debts of 195 million other people put it between 170 and 300 million but he had these debts he didn't have the money to pay them back now so his bank no assets no assets and this is for a guy who at one stage his network varies depending on where you look but at one stage he was meant to be worth about 2.8 billion and now he couldn't pay it

[01:01:27] back and over these intervening years he would have had entered tons of negotiations with his creditors and by about 2014 all his creditors agreed to a deal you know that he would pay them back selling his assets and all that except for one the aib a bank that had been nationalized by the government because of the 2008 crash

[01:01:50] and they refused to agree with the other creditors and so o'reilly um was i suppose forced to go over to bahamas and declare bankruptcy over there um and a lot of people will have criticized the aib for that because they're like if all these other creditors international creditors and everything were willing to go with this why weren't she willing to agree with it why did you put this man into bankruptcy um who had who seemed

[01:02:17] to have done so much for for the country in ways he did i mean he you know okay water for crystal ended up being a bit of a disaster and a bit of a shit show but he really did put everything into it including his own money to big time to try and save that company he hadn't done a whole lot of bad okay we mentioned his interference in the press but on the scale of business tycoons i think the good really

[01:02:42] outweighs the bad i think in many ways there was actually one other story in the bad scale just when i mentioned it because it was mentioned briefly um matt cooper was asked about in the podcast and he didn't follow up on it so i followed up on this there's a journalist called joe mccarton joe mccarton was a journalist with independent news and media and he was following up a story on ray burke right

[01:03:07] ray burke was a fianna fall politician who was ultimately convicted of corruption this journalist joe mccarton when o'reilly was head of owned independent news and media was doing a story on ray burke and all of a sudden his salary he was cut and he was more or less i suppose what you call a constructive dismissal really he was forced out of independent news and media so that's a black mark against

[01:03:33] o'reilly but having said that people do question why aib um pulled the rug from underneath him when all his other creditors didn't but anyway he had to declare bankruptcy in the bahamas and he was forced then to sell off all of his prize assets his castle martin estate he sold in 2015 for 28 million to none

[01:03:57] other than john malone a guy who pops up in so many episodes yeah yeah uh he had to sell his his money he bought this money painting for 24 million he had to sell that he had to sell all his jack b yates um paintings everything now he didn't live in poverty for the remainder of his life because his wife he had a very rich wife a very rich wife and i know at the time some people were saying well why can't

[01:04:21] his wife pay his debts i'm kind of going why the fuck should she you know why should she give her money to the irish bloody banks who the taxpayer had to bail out what does she have to do with that it's her and her brother had done his fair share chipping in he did put in a fair whack of money to try and save water for crystal so yeah there's an awful lot of begrudges in ireland yeah but uh so he

[01:04:45] didn't live the rest of his life in poverty but the last 10 years of his life i'm sure it must have been very hard for him um having achieved so much and for it all to come crumbling down um yeah that and and that i suppose huge achievements a huge ego yeah probably pick up the phone and get hold of anybody yeah and

[01:05:10] then suddenly you're probably a pariah bankrupt pariah with no influence anymore must have been shattering for him well i mean he he stayed out of public you didn't see much from from 2014 onwards but he did attend a belvedere uh day belvedere named a rugby room after him in 2018 and he came back to that and apparently he was very reticent to go there because you know he i suppose there must have been

[01:05:37] some reluctance because of the position he was in but apparently he enjoyed the day massively when he got there and gave a great talk and he ended his talk by with the following line he said the lesson about winning and losing is that if you don't know how to lose you don't know how to live um so very philosophical about it all and he did emerge from bankruptcy in january 2024 but he passed away then

[01:06:02] in may 2024 at the age of 88 and at his funeral his sons said that by the end of his life he had made peace with everything and he was content that he had lived uh a very full life and a and a remarkable life and i was thinking about this keith and some people will point it and say yeah didn't it end in failure and i think failure is a bit harsh because when you have had so much success in your life as

[01:06:30] he had in so many different fields we're not just talking about business it's so many different fields and just in his personality and everything i don't think you can say you can say yes he had a failure when in 2008 and and the last 10 years mightn't have been ideal but you'd have to look back in his life overall and say there was a huge amount of success yeah it's almost shakespearean the final act was a tragedy in a way but the rest of it was was quite the opposite i'd say the rest of it was dazzling

[01:07:00] he dazzled on the rugby field he dazzled on the the business boardroom he he dazzled with all the political elites and the celebrities um but yeah you're right shakespearean in the end in that there was that sense of loss and definitely disappointment yeah i suppose you would hope that in some way um from a human perspective he didn't dwell on that final act too much and he was

[01:07:27] able to enjoy looking back on on his achievements for his own sake i would hope so being rather than being some sort of um a citizen kane type character yeah with anger and regret you know because it is a remarkable life it is a remarkable story and thanks for bringing it up keith because i hadn't thought about tony early maybe because he was so close to home so um yeah great story brilliant right looking

[01:07:53] forward to the next one all righty have a good one okay dogs cheers yeah bye bye bye