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Sir Anthony O’Reilly (Tony O’Reilly) retired as Chairman of Independent News and Media (INM) on his seventy-third birthday on May 7th, after a fractious spell with fellow shareholder and telecoms billionaire, Denis O’Brien. His role as Chairman has now passed to his son Gavin who had been chief operating officer. Gavin is the only remaining O’Reilly family member on the board and O’Brien will take three seats on the reduced board of directors, ending the era of O’Reilly. Worse, INM shares are down by 85% in the last year and according to the Daily Telegraph as Village went to print, traders were predicting it would be forced into administration before the end of May as talks between shareholders and bond-holders collapsed. O’Reilly steps down from INM after nearly fifty years of gilded business achievement that has ended with a difficult couple of years. One-time-redhead O’Reilly was brought up in the leafy Northside Dublin suburb of Glasnevin where his family lived on Griffith Road. He was educated at Belvedere College where he was an incipient renaissance man; he played soccer, cricket and tennis, and was an altar boy and enjoyed amateur dramatics. Apocryphally he would sell his lunch to the highest bidder at break-time. At the age of fifteen, O’Reilly allegedly found out that his father, John, had another family of four with his estranged wife Judith. O’Reilly’s parents married in 1976, shortly after the death of John’s first wife. His most renowned extra-curricular activity was rugby where he excelled; and he went on to be a world-class centre for Ireland, the Barbarians and the Lions. Eamon Dunphy has famously drawn attention to his splendid “melon-like buttocks”, dating from that period. At the same time he was beginning a gentleman’s education, studying philosophy at UCD, but he later qualified in the law, although he never practised, except to become chairman of white-shoe law firm, Matheson, Ormsby and Prentice. After a brief time at Sutton’s coal and oil merchants in Cork, O’Reilly, who had earned a doctorate in agricultural marketing from bleak Bradford University, took a (for then, glittering) job at An Bórd Bainne as general manager in 1962 and developed the Kerrygold brand, one of the very first truly Irish brands. In 1966 he joined the Irish Sugar Company as Chief Executive and became involved in business dealings with food company HJ Heinz & Co. An accident around this time and an alleged conviction for careless driving did not deter Taoiseach Jack Lynch from offering the prodigious O’Reilly a post as Minister for Agriculture. O’Reilly declined. By 1973, he was president of Heinz and that same year he purchased a controlling share in Independent newspapers when the titles had a turnover of c.€12m. He was promoted to chief executive at Heinz in 1979 and became the first non-family chairman of the company in 1987. O’Reilly remained at the helm of Heinz until 1998 increasing the company’s value twelvefold (from $908 million to $11 billion before a few fallow years; and during that time continued to build Independent Newspapers (now Independent News and Media) with operations in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India. He built INM into a €1.5bn going concern but over recent years the group has struggled with excessive debt and unprofitability. O’Reilly and INM deserve credit for running the London Independent newspaper even though it has lost money consistently since his bought it in. It is one of the world’s great challenging papers. Whatever one may think of the Sunday Independent – which is tattle-ridden and often appears to indulge nasty vendettas – and the Irish Independent, they are also both clever products and it is likely that in the absence of O’Reilly they would have veered considerably down-market. Nevertheless Bertie Ahern’s favourable treatment in the titles over the years may well have something to do with the legislation he introduced in 1994 reducing the restrictions on tax exiles, such as Tony O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s retirement from INM closes an important chapter for one of Ireland’s most successful sons. He was for a long time pre-eminent in a group of self made men who became rich in the 1970s – men such as Barney Eastwood, Tony Ryan, Lochlann Quinn, JP McManus and John Magnier – they were the first group since Irish independence in 1922 to make themselves rich and (mostly) hold onto their money. However, he had has his share of controversy, particularly when Rennick’s Manufacturing made a payment of IR£30,000 to Ray Burke in 1991. The payment was a contribution to Fianna Fáil received by Burke in 1989 from Rennick’s which is a subsidiary of the Fitzwilton Group, controlled and chaired by O’Reilly. It emerged later that Burke had agreed to most of the central terms sought by Independent Newspapers for the operation of the Multichannel Distribution Service, a television relay licences service, though no connection is established and Fitzwilton stated that Tony O’ Reilly, was “absolutely not” aware of the £30,000 contribution intended for Fianna Fáil, and that he was not aware that the payment had been made by way of a cheque payable to “cash”. Through administrative ineptitude the tribunal failed to comply with the requirements made by law for it to pursue this issue and we may never know what happened. Around this time, O’Reilly who is famously gregarious dropped off the media and gossip lists; and he seldom figures in the press now. Village appears unique in marking his INM retirement, perhaps because the media are fractiously divided as to whether he is hero (in which case unfortunately there is little good news for them to publish at the moment) or antichrist; and because serious criticism sometimes fetches the author in trouble in the columns of the Sunday Independent. For whatever reason O’Reilly is largely unknown to people under thirty. O’Reilly married his first wife, Susan Cameron in 1962. They had six children together, including triplets and he now has more than twenty grandchildren. O’Reilly and Cameron divorced towards the

Whatever happened to the Iraq war? Remember six years ago Junior, Dick and Donald brought us ‘shock and awe.’ Critics were dismissed: “ Our boys will be welcomed with flowers and kisses”. Then the oil would flow, a beacon of democracy would be established and the troops would be home by Christmas, leaving a coke-swilling, burger-eating, mall-shopping, Israel-loving Middle East in their wake. What’s more it wasn’t going to cost a cent. The black gold would underwrite the whole show. Heck it was a ‘no brainer’! Bob Woodward’s series of books on the whole tragic affair perfectly captures the ‘no brainer’ ambiance in the Oval Office, the ‘jocks in the locker room’ mentality that prevailed amongst the principals. Significantly, with the exception of the first compromised and later isolated, Colin Powell, none of the main men had actually seen the reality of their ‘bring it on’ machismo on the battlefield. Nor did they seem too concerned about how their ass-kicking leadership might be interpreted down the ranks or indeed how it would affect the image of the US. Paul Wolfowitz and the neo-cons’ vision of a Prague like spring in Baghdad was seriously wounded by the atrocity exhibition that was Abu Ghraib. The vision, however, staggered on until it officially died in 2005 in Haditha. The myth of the liberator finally hit the dirt there too in the My Lai type horror that followed an ambush on a platoon of US Marines. A couple of grunts were wounded but what made the remainder lose the plot was the sight of a well-liked comrade’s upper torso flying out of his Humvee leaving his legs behind in the car seat. When the Marines’ homicidal rage subsided, 24 Iraqis, including women, children and the elderly, lay dead. The actual insurgents, by all accounts, got away safely. Armies in general, and the US army in particular, are easy targets for armchair critique. But as Thomas Ricks’ bestselling book “Fiasco” reveals, the most enlightened critique of how the US was actually conducting the war came from those officers faced with the problem of implementing ‘no brainer’ policies on the ground. By 2005 those top brass who cared to look were already registering US troop morale plummet as ordinary soldiers paid with their lives for the lack of any long-term strategy. The savagery at Haditha was indicative of this. It seemed that we were returning to Vietnam “destroy to save” absurdity and the Iraqi people were realising to their horror that there’s only two letters between liberate and obliterate. While Washington was dismissing insurgents as “dead-enders”, the brass on the ground was clamouring for a new strategy and starting to discuss defeat. In fact, they needed a strategy that would let the army do what armies need to do – seize the initiative. Because ever since their ‘shock and awe’ premiere, the three horsemen of the White House were doing their blockbuster best to hide the fact that they were not directing the show – when they weren’t merely reacting, they were winging it. Lacking leadership and direction, the army was constantly in defensive mode. The gap between Washington and Baghdad became critical, prompting the unprecedented ‘Generals’ Revolt’. It was a very American coup in that a handful of retired generals broke protocol and spoke out, criticising Rumsfeld’s management of the war. The plan to train, equip and hand the situation over to Iraqi troops, some argued, was not only unreal but surreal. The Generals argued their intervention was necessary as one of Rumsfeld’s achievements was his monopolisation of the traditional avenues of information to the President, thereby both undermining a healthy system of checks and balances and encouraging Bush in such unstatesmanlike conduct as his ‘bring it on’ caper. Come 2006, as Baghdad descended into sectarian savagery; the Republicans were badly mauled in the US congressional elections. Bush’s own ratings plummeted to new lows. In fact, things were getting so bad that not even Rumsfeld could paper over the cracks. Finally he got his marching orders. His replacement as Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, instantly realised that something had to be done, fast. First the US had to work out what it was doing in Iraq. So the democracy and human- rights talk gave way to the still ambitious words – “stable” and “unified”. There was one immediate priority, a ‘no brainer’- security. The now dominant Democrats were happy to criticise from the sidelines but did not want the responsibility of picking up such a problematic ball as Iraq. So with nothing to lose and a free hand, Bush finally opened the Oval Office to some alternative thinking. It was the moment General David Petraeus was waiting for. The current military strategy did not provide security for the people but it did provide targets for the insurgents. So you got the worst casualties, pointless ones. The General also argued against the policy of pulling US troops out of built-up areas and into fortress camps. Not alone did this alienate them from the people but it made their predictable patrols easy targets for the increasingly sophisticated roadside bombs that were claiming most US lives and limbs. The US was now fighting a counterinsurgency war and needed to adapt. The goal was to win people not terrain. Petraeus called for more troops on the ground, lots more. He wanted to throw some 30,000 extra troops into what some thought was a lost cause, others said was a cause for the Iraqis, and still others again said was simply a wrong cause. But Petraeus said it was the only option. His plan essentially involved standard counter-insurgency tenets – get your troops out into the towns, on foot, among the people, help create security and slowly win some degree of trust. Small outposts were to be established in towns. And, having seen the effect on morale of winning terrain by day to lose it again at night, these posts were to be held at all costs. As in many