His stellar career at Heinz contrasted with the troubled history of his Irish businesses. In the early 1970s he built a small conglomerate, Fitzwilliam Securities, but in the slump of 1974 its profits collapsed and his banks threatened liquidation. For a time, he flew over from America every weekend in an attempt to save it, succeeding only by selling almost all of its assets. Another O’Reilly company, Atlantic Resources, lost £40 million fruitlessly searching for oil off Ireland’s west coast in the 1980s.
But there were also what seemed for many years to be notable successes. Through the acquisition of the Irish Independent newspaper group in 1973, O’Reilly became Ireland’s leading press baron and later expanded his publishing interests to encompass some 200 newspapers in Australia, South Africa and the UK, where he bought a stake in the Independent and Independent on Sunday in 1994 and took full ownership of them in 1998.
In 1990 he formed a consortium to buy control of Waterford Wedgwood, the merger of Ireland’s historic Waterford crystal glass business with Wedgwood bone china in England. The group was beset by labour problems and rising foreign competition, but O’Reilly succeeded in turning it around, raising its marketing profile and expanding it by acquisition.
In the 2000s, however, the impact of globalisation took its toll. O’Reilly (with his brother-in-law Peter Goulandris) injected some €400 million of family money to keep Waterford Wedgwood afloat, but it went into receivership in 2009 (the brands were subsequently revived by Finnish owners), wiping out a substantial slice of his fortune.