Businessman Tony O'Reilly has died in Dublin following a short illness.
He was aged 88.
A spokesperson said Mr O'Reilly was surrounded by family members when he passed away in St Vincent's Hospital today.
In a statement, Mr O'Reilly’s family said: "In the coming days there will be many worthy tributes made to Tony O’Reilly’s unique and extraordinary achievements in the fields of business and sport.
"As well as his extraordinary philanthropic vision which was best evidenced by the establishment of the Ireland Funds at a dark time in this island’s history.
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Tony O’Reilly was born in Dublin in 1936.
He was educated in the Jesuit school Belvedere College where his rugby prowess quickly shone.
Aged 18 he made his international debut as a centre against France in 1955.
That same year he became the youngest-ever player selected for the British and Irish Lions.
His record for the number of tries scored by a Lions player still stands.
This guy doesn't have such a great reputation in SA, put bluntly some will be very happy and raise a glass to his death.
In the 1990s independent news media bought English language newspapers in SA. Collectively these were the most important media organisations in the country and the most profitable, obviously the media is important in any democracy and these had all been anti-apartheid in some way. A report form the time states "Argus owns 12 newspapers around the country, produced revenues of £135m and pre-tax profits of £10.5m last year, publishes 4 million newspapers a week, and has a daily circulation market share of 68 per cent in the country's four largest cities", and those were 1994 £ values. If you were going to buy media companies in SA in the 1990s you would buy those papers. He didn't reinvest and used them to extract wealth, even things of national importance like the archives of each newspaper were destroyed. After decades of this asset stripping this degraded collection of newspaper titles were sold to a very dodgy group of people who turned them all into ANC propaganda outlets which no one reads. This has harmed democracy in SA.
Something very different happened with Afrikaans language media. Naspers was a very small company focused on traditional media when apartheid ended, ironically its main publication was City Press an English language Sunday paper read mostly by black people, but it also owned Afrikaans newspapers Die Burger, Rapport, and Beeld. Its origins and support for apartheid are well known. Back in the early 1990s it was a small mostly Afrikaans newspaper focused company, which basically no one would want to invest into. In the 1990s the papers O'Reilly bought printed more copies per week than there are Afrikaner people. But they reinvested into SA their newspapers as well as TV and online. They now dominate the SA media space, but have also expanded globally into different sectors mostly in tech. They own all or a large slice of Tencent, Stack Overflow, Udemy, PayU, OLX and other businesses covering fintech/e-commerce/education/social media/logistics/agri. Easily $40bn of assets, enough to write off their $1bn or so stake in VK the Russian social media company like it was nothing.
A stark difference in performance, and mostly down to O'Reilly's failure as he owned nearly all of the big English language newspapers. I don't believe he was a great businessman.
Koos Bekker is the man behind Nasper's rise. I saw an interview with him years back, he was asked about all this and how a conservative Afrikaans media group first beat the English media in SA and then invested globally mostly in tech companies. He replied "they were stupid and we weren't".
