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The Life Of O’Reilly

We’ve always thought Sir Tony O’Reilly was a fascinating figure and he’s certainly a man about whom the stories are legend. When he passed away last week, the tributes were fulsome. And so they should have been.

Here was a man who played rugby for Ireland and the British Lions, who went on to shake up the Irish diary industry in his Kerrygold days and then rise to the very top of one of America’s biggest business, Heinz. And that’s before he moved on to Waterford Wedgwood and Independent Newspapers.

And, of course, his wasn’t a story of continual success. He effectively lost everything following the collapses of Waterford Wedgwood and was eventually declared bankrupt. Nor was he universally popular in Ireland, where his anglified ways and insistence on the Sir Anthony moniker didn’t endear him to some quarters.

But he was a formidable businessman and a giant of a man. In one of his last speeches at a Dubin rugby club event, he said: “Life is about winning and losing. If you don’t know how to lose, you don’t know how to live.”

One of the most enduring stories about the man is the one about when he was recalled to the Ireland side in 1970 after an absence of six years. He was a well-established businessman at that stage and Willie John McBride is reported to have said that he turned up for training in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce and that the chauffeur carried his kit into the changing room. When he was tackled in the match againt England at Twickenham, someone shouted from the terrace “you can tackle his chauffeur as well……”

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