Tony O'Reilly

Sir Anthony John Francis O'Reilly AO (7 May 1936 – 18 May 2024) was an Irish businessman and international rugby union player. He was known for his try scoring in rugby, his involvement in the Independent News & Media Group, which he led from 1973 to 2009, and as CEO and chairman of the H.J. Heinz Company. He was the leading shareholder of Waterford Wedgwood and a founder and major supporter of The Ireland Funds. A citizen of both Ireland and the United Kingdom, he was knighted as a Knight Bachelor for his services to Northern Ireland.

As a rugby player, he represented Ireland, the British and Irish Lions and the Barbarians and is enshrined as a member of the International Rugby Board's Hall of Fame. In business, he was noted for multiple successful roles, and became a billionaire, but by 2014, was being pursued in the Irish courts for debts amounting to €22 million by AIB, following losses amounting to hundreds of millions of euros in his unsuccessful attempt to save the Waterford Wedgwood group and to stop Denis O'Brien from assuming control of Independent News & Media.

O'Reilly had six children from his first marriage, and 23 grandchildren, and was later married to Greek shipping heiress Chryss Goulandris, who died in 2023. He lived in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas until 2017, when the property was sold for less than €12 million as part of a bankruptcy arrangement. O'Reilly later lived in Château des Ducs de Normandie in Bonneville-sur-Touques in France and in County Kildare, Ireland. He died, after a short illness, at a hospital in Dublin on 18 May 2024, at the age of 88.

O'Reilly was born in Dublin and was the only child of a civil servant, John O'Reilly (1906–1976), and Aileen O'Connor (1914–1989). O'Reilly's Drogheda-born father, eventually an inspector-general of customs, was born "Reilly" and added the O' when he applied to join the Irish Civil Service. Previously married with four older children, but estranged from his first wife, John O'Reilly married Aileen O'Connor in 1973, after the death of his first wife and only a little time after he had told his son of his other family. O'Reilly had been told about the situation by a Jesuit when he was 15, but kept it secret. He arranged for the John and Aileen O'Reilly Library at Dublin City University to be named after his parents, and O'Reilly Hall at University College Dublin to be named after his father, who had studied there.

O'Reilly, named "Tony" after his mother's favourite brother, grew up on Griffith Avenue, a broad middle-class street in the Drumcondra/Glasnevin area of Dublin. He had prominent red hair. He holidayed with family, including an aunt in Balbriggan, cousins in Sligo and others in Drogheda. In 1951, the family moved to a bungalow in Santry.^{[citation needed]}

Educated at Belvedere College from the age of six, O'Reilly participated in several sports, including association football, cricket, tennis, and rugby union. As a youth, he played football for Home Farm. In cricket he was a member of the Junior Cup-winning team in 1950; in tennis, he was in a Leinster Schools Cup-winning team and reached the under-15 national semi-finals. He was also noted for his acting skills (and participated in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas such as Iolanthe, and Dunsany's A Night at an Inn). He was an altar boy, and a regular attendee at chapel, and during his time there spent a summer in the Gaeltacht to improve his Irish language skills. He passed the Leaving Certificate at 17, and with four schoolmates, studied philosophy, still at Belvedere, for a year after this, while developing his rugby. He was a prefect for his last two years at the school, and a senior member of a key sodality.

O'Reilly went on to study law at University College Dublin and then at the Incorporated Law Society of Ireland. He came fifth in Ireland in intermediate exams in 1956, and first and third in the country in final examinations in 1958, and was enrolled as a solicitor in November 1958. He never practised after training, but later became chairman of the major Dublin solicitors' firm now known as Matheson.

O'Reilly earned a PhD in agricultural marketing from the University of Bradford, and in addition, held at least one honorary doctorate.