Politics

Journalism now

The list of organisations tainted by such practices reads like a directory of eminent employers… both Aer Lingus and First National Building Society (now First Active plc) have lost Chief Executives arising from bullying…

Four out of five workers have been bullied during their careers

Where two years ago a financial crisis was having to break a fifty to pay for your tuna-melt bagel and Australian goat milk cappuccino, now the preponderance of personal wealth in western economies has been severely diminished

So returning to the Mansion House to wave the green flag, albeit for just one evening, was for Sinn Féin a symbolic revisiting of the republican roots

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