Rugby star, billionaire, bankrupt and media man: Tony O’Reilly puts it down to luck and hard work

His fortune was said to have been estimated at €2.8 billion at one point, and in 2010 he was €300 million in debt, with nine financial institutions chasing him for payments.

O’Reilly had it all. He was a famous athlete, a talented pianist and a brilliant imitator who loved company and had a charismatic personality.

Business was his lifelong obsession, and his astonishing successes included increasing the value of American food giant Heinz from $908 million when he took over the company in 1971 to $11 billion in 1998.

At the height of his career, he owned an international newspaper empire, was a major shareholder in the Waterford Wedgewood crystal company, and invested in offshore oil drilling, soft drink bottling, fertilizer production, and a vast private art collection.

In 1973 he bought a 28% stake in Independent News and Media (INM).

Titles included the Irish Independent, Sunday Independent and Evening Herald.

Over the next three decades, he expanded his press interests to include titles from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Born on May 7, 1936, Tony O’Reilly was educated by the Jesuits at Belvedere College from the age of six.

It was these priests who revealed to him, when he was 15, the secret that his parents were not married.

They also told him how his father abandoned his wife and four children in Wicklow before falling in love with the daughter of a Dublin property owner, 22-year-old Aileen O’Connor – O’Reilly’s mother.

O’Reilly was a good student at school, but his passion was rugby.

In his senior year at Belevedere, he scored a school-record 42 touchdowns in 21 games.

When he went to University College Dublin to study law, he continued to play rugby, and at the age of 19 he was selected for the Lions tour of South Africa.

He achieved further rugby honors on the Lions tours in 1955 and 1959, scoring 38 tries between both tours – a record for the last 100 years.

During his second Lions tour, the athlete met his first wife, Susan Cameron, on a blind date in Sydney.

The couple married in 1962 and within four years had six children – Susan, Cameron, Justin and the triplets Gavin, Tony and Caroline.

As O’Reilly’s career took off, the couple moved to the United States, to a Tudor-style mansion overlooking a golf course in the affluent Fox Chapel neighborhood on the outskirts of Pittsburgh.

The 14-acre home had a swimming pool and tennis courts.

The now millionaire commuted regularly between the United States and Ireland to look after his Irish business interests.

He expressed some regret about the tight schedule.

“It’s the children who are paying for my travel success and I really wonder if the price is too high. Is there anything worth being an absent father?”

O’Reilly’s first job was with a British management consulting firm and then with Suttons, an Irish general merchandiser.

Within five years he was appointed chief executive of Bord Bainne, the Irish Dairy Board.

He was responsible for the development of ‘Kerrygold’, Ireland’s first international dairy brand to sell butter in the UK market.

Ahead of his time, O’Reilly used advertising techniques such as radio jingles and television slots to promote the product, resulting in sales skyrocketing.

Four years later he became head of the Irish Sugar Company and used the same techniques to revitalize the country’s sugar industry.

In 1969, the CEO of the American Heinz Corporation, Burt Gookin, hired him to run the company’s British subsidiary, and he was quickly appointed senior vice president in charge of Heinz’s North American and Pacific operations.

At the age of 37, he became president of the company and in less than twenty years at the helm he was the highest-paid executive in the US, earning €55 million a year.

Around this time, he met Chryss Goulandris, the daughter of a Greek shipping tycoon, at a New York hotel where he regularly stayed on business trips.

His first marriage had already broken down and in 1994 he married Goulandris.

One of the gifts for his new wife was a diamond ring worth 2.45 million euros, which was originally ordered by Aristotle Onassis when he married former US first lady Jackie Kennedy.

The couple moved between their homes in Castlemartin, Co Kildare – a 26,000 sq ft mansion on a 750-acre horse farm – a house in the Bahamas, another in Deauville, France, and an Irish holiday home in Glandore, West Cork.

Through his business connections, O’Reilly has helped raise over $100 million through the Ireland Fund for worthy Irish charities and peace process projects.

In 2001, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his “long and distinguished service to Northern Ireland”.

During his professional career, he became friends with many world leaders. US President Ronald Reagan sent him a video message on his 50th birthday in which he jokingly called him “an ordinary kid” and added that “in a few decades you will be old enough to think about running for public office.”

His friends included Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, US senator Ted Kennedy and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who called him Ireland’s “renaissance man”.

Anti-apartheid revolutionary and South African president Nelson Mandela spent several holidays at O’Reilly’s home in the Bahamas and at Castlemartin.

In 1990, O’Reilly first invested in Waterford Wedgewood crystal. It was this company that helped unravel his wealth.

With the company teetering on the brink, O’Reilly and his brother-in-law Peter Goulandris spent more than €400 million to prop it up and lost millions when the company collapsed in 2009.

Also that year, it lost control of its independent news and media titles following a takeover bid by Denis O’Brien. O’Reilly had so many loans that he had no means to repay them.

It currently owes banks an estimated €300 million and has made efforts to repay some of that debt by selling its assets.

He sold Castlemartin for €26.5 million, his townhouse in Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin for €3.2 million and his house in Glandore for €1.5 million.

He sold several smaller paintings and sculptures from what is probably the most valuable private art collection ever assembled in Ireland, but the location of most of the remaining collections is unknown.

They included a painting by French Impressionist Claude Monet purchased for $24.2 million and several large paintings by Jack B. Yeats.

In September 2016, Castlemartin furniture was auctioned.

In November 2015, O’Reilly was declared bankrupt in the Bahamas. This did not affect his wife’s vast personal fortune because she was not the personal guarantor of her husband’s businesses.

In recent years he has become a reclusive person, spending much of his time at the couple’s beachfront villa, Lissadel, near Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas.

However, in recent months, O’Reilly emerged from bankruptcy.

Mr. O’Reilly’s creditors received a final dividend from his assets, and the Supreme Court of the Bahamas closed the bankruptcy proceedings in December on the basis that all of his assets had been realized for the benefit of his creditors.

His wife, Lady Chryss O’Reilly (73), died unexpectedly in August last year.

The Irish Independent learns that all of Mr O’Reilly’s children have been in Ireland in recent weeks.

He died in St Vincent’s Hospital on Saturday morning at the age of 88.

He once said of his business success: “I am often portrayed as an extremely confident guy. I’m not so sure at all. I envy others who are.

“I am where I am today because of luck and hard work.”