Ireland’s boy wonder who took the Lions tour of South Africa by storm in 1955

Tony O’Reilly playing rugby for the Lions in a match against the Junior All Blacks in New Zealand in 1959. Photograph: Getty

No matter how well the Irish international rugby players perform on the current British and Irish Lions tour of Australia, none of them is likely to match the impact that Dubliner Tony O’Reilly made 70 years ago this summer during the 1955 Lions tour of South Africa.

Not yet three months past his 19th birthday, he scored two tries on his Lions debut and he played in all four test matches against South Africa in August and September when South Africa were regarded as the best team in the world. He was top scorer on that tour with 15 tries, including one in the first and fourth test matches.

“His speed shook the Springboks,” said the Sunday Press report on the first test, which the Lions won 23-22, in Johannesburg. The accompanying photograph was captioned: “The fast-running Tony O’Reilly, whose great individual efforts were rewarded by scoring a try.”

Another try in the fourth and final test in Port Elizabeth, where South Africa won by 22 points to 8 to share the series 2-2, enabled the same paper to headline its match report: O’Reilly Stars As Tourists Go Down. The Irish Times report was more phlegmatic. “He dislocated his shoulder when scoring, but the bone was later replaced successfully,” it said. (Idiosyncratic house styles dictated that the The Irish Times called the travelling team “British Isles” while the Sunday Press called them “British and Irish XV” or “the Tourists”.)

During the subsequent Lions tour of Australia, New Zealand and Canada in 1959, O’Reilly scored a try in each of the test wins over Australia and in two of the four tests against New Zealand. His combined total of 37 tries on the 1955 and 1959 tours remains a Lions record. The 17 tries he scored in New Zealand in 1959 is also a Lions record.

O’Reilly won his first Irish international cap, aged 18, in January 1955, less than two months after he was hailed as “an up-and-coming boy wonder” in the Sunday Press, then the country’s best-bestselling paper. Already “attracting attention as a great attacking player” on the Old Belvedere senior team, the 6ft 3.5in, 14-stone O’Reilly had also achieved success at cricket, tennis and soccer, it noted.

“He has four School Cup medals for tennis and was on the Belvedere team which won the Schools Cricket Cup as a wicketkeeper and opening bat,” the report said, adding: “In cricket he has provincial honours and was a reserve for the Schools of Ireland team. At soccer Tony played for Home Farm and got a trial as a centre-forward for the Irish Schools against England, but was unable to play because of a Rugby Cup match.”

Rugby renown was followed by a successful business career, initially as general manager of An Bord Báinne, the Irish Dairy Board, for whom he oversaw the launch of the internationally successful Kerrygold butter brand.

He became chairman and chief executive of the giant US food group Heinz and owner of the Waterford Wedgwood crystal glass and ceramics brands.

[ Tony O’Reilly: A dazzling star who left a mark on many facets of Irish societyOpens in new window ]

He also enjoyed more than 35 years as a “media magnate” (a now obsolescent term), peaking in ownership of 128 newspapers and a number of radio stations and TV cable interests in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and Britain.

He gained control of the Irish Independent group in 1973 and he became majority owner of Ireland’s bestselling Sunday World five years later. After another five years he had full control over the Independent Group and from about 1990 onwards he was in effect bankrolling the Sunday Tribune. He was also joint owner of the Anglo-Irish tabloid Daily Star and owner of the Belfast Telegraph.

His investments in the Sunday Tribune and in the London Independent and Independent on Sunday probably never made a penny profit, however. Neither did his multimillion pound 1994 investment and loan to the owners of the newspaper that had first heralded his sporting prowess, the Sunday Press, and its sister daily and evening titles.

The State’s Competition Authority found that the investment and loan amounted to “very serious breaches” of the Competition Act and “an abuse of a dominant position” by O’Reilly’s Independent group.

The Press group collapsed in May 1995 and O’Reilly was ousted from Independent News & Media (INM) in 2009. His shareholdings in INM and Waterford Wedgwood nosedived in value, foreshadowing his serious illness and bankruptcy.

His long-serving INM chief executive Vincent Crowley was asked later what value had been attributed to the Press shareholding in its annual reports. He replied: “Zero.”

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