Tony O’Reilly, who died on Saturday, became a marketing genius when he put a gold wrapper on a slab of old Ireland, creating the Kerrygold brand that still glitters on the shelves of the world’s supermarkets. This seems apt: O’Reilly was Ireland’s most iconic capitalist but he ultimately did more to wrap it in a golden sheen of wealth than to create an ideal of sustainable prosperity.

Keeping things under wraps was an impulse he developed early. When he was a teenager, O’Reilly discovered that he was not, as he had always believed, an only child. In his last year at Belvedere College in Dublin, some of the Jesuit priests who taught him took him aside. They told him that his parents were not married to each other, that his father had another wife and other children – the three half-sisters and one half-brother whom he had never met.

The Jesuits may have told him all of this because they wanted to spare him the shock of later revelations or they may have been concerned that O’Reilly might be considering the idea of entering the priesthood. An “illegitimate” child, which is how he was stamped in Irish law, could not be a priest.

It was not until 1987 that the legal concept of illegitimacy was removed from the law. Well past the age of 50, O’Reilly, as well as being the richest man in Ireland, was also secretly a second-class Irishman.

It’s hard to avoid the belief that something of his origins must have been present in what O’Reilly became. It may be there in the obsessive hunger for success that was........

© The Irish Times