SOME said he was a saint. Shortly before he committed suicide, Australian pop star Michael Hutchence, the boyfriend of his estranged wife, is alleged to have called him Satan. Saint or sinner, Bob Geldof remains one of the most passionate, potent and unique ambassadors for what he once angrily dubbed this priest-and police-ruled banana republic.
This week, he and his two partners pocketed £5 million each from the sale of Planet 24, their TV and Radio Production Company. He will stay on as a consultant and is in Dublin this weekend to publicise tonight's Skyfest fireworks which is set to make the now Carlton TV-owned Planet 24, which has the international TV rights to the event, even richer. Put the traditional Irish begrudgery on hold.
Geldof's unrivalled capacity to generate millions for others is well documented but he has long aspired to procuring a similar fortune for himself. In 1978, he told a journalist about one of the motivating factors in becoming the lead singer with his punk rock outfit the Boomtown Rats. "I want to have more money than anyone else. I don't want it for the sake of having money. But for the freedom of choice and what it can get you."
The Boomtown Rats, with their short-lived success, their sprinkling of number ones and their inevitable and inglorious demise, never made him his fortune. Apart from I Don't Like Mondays and Rat Trap, his pop career was more memorable for the reputation he acquired as a SMIB (scruffy, mouthy, Irish bloke) and for his unwillingness to court media or record industry types who responded to his stubborn refusal to play the banal pop game by repeatedly baying for his blood.
He was relatively penniless in pop star terms when his career took a more philanthropic turn on the night in 1984 when he sat in a cloud of anguish and rage watching the images of starving Ethiopians on TV. In his best selling autobiography, Is That It?, he wrote that what he saw spurred him to making the starstudded pop single Do They Know It's Christmas for Band Aid at a fraction of the price of a normal recording.
Even as a charitable icon in the years which followed, meeting Mother Teresa, berating Margaret Thatcher (who once memorably described him as "a true Brit with true grit"), he was not without his critics. Some lambasted him for putting his band (who at this stage couldn't get arrested, never mind a sell-out gig at Wembley) on the bill at Live Aid, to which he petulantly responded: "It's my ball game and I'll play with it."
Other critics complained that his charitable endeavours didn't address the root causes of famine, provoking another classic Geldof response which went something like: "F--- off and give me a pound."
Some saw him as an a la carte do-gooder who was reluctant to get involved in fundraising for the miners' strike of the 1980s. He said the strike was too political but a year later rowed in behind the ill-conceived and arguably politically-rooted Self Aid event in Dublin to tackle the unemployment problem where the Boomtown Rats played their final gig.
The events that saw this solidly middle-class boy going from reading Chairman Mao's Little Red Book while at school in the fee-paying Blackrock College to being presented with Eamonn Andrews's big red book on This Is Your Life are recounted eloquently in his autobiography.
Home life in Dun Laoghaire with his two sisters was difficult - his mother died of a brain haemorrhage when he was 10 and he had a turbulent relationship with his father, with whom he is now said to be close.
He failed his Leaving Cert and spent time digging roads and learning photography before he went to Spain, later embarking on a journalistic career in Vancouver, Canada. While there, he became music editor of the GeorgiaStraight, before coming home with the intention of setting up a free ads magazine. A bank manager told the fundseeking Geldof to come back when he was 40.
However, music had become more important at that stage anyway. The Boomtown Rats (the name was inspired by a phrase coined by Woodie Guthrie) were set up with some likeminded fame-seekers and soon Geldof was a bona fide pop star who was soon to encounter the 17-year-old Paula Yates in a limousine where she seduced him.
They spent 18 years together and had three children, Fifi, Peaches and Pixie. This trend for unconventional names has since been eagerly continued by the likes of Demi Moore and half of the Spice Girls.
The late 1990s saw him split with his wife, who left him for INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence. He struggled through a painful divorce and won a battle for custody of his children to whom he is devoted.
With uncharacteristic restraint he has managed to maintain a dignified silence about the events. A single father, a friend said "he has his dark days but is very resilient".
"He has had a horrible time in the press, being doorstepped for months on end. But he is tough enough and works extremely hard so I am absolutely delighted that he has finally made a financial killing," he said.
Geldof, who rarely drinks alcohol, is now working on an album and still regards himself primarily as a musician, although a friend said "he is probably better at business". He says the some-time DJ is essentially an ideas man and gets a thrill from the collaborative process of launching something like Channel 4's Big Breakfast which revolutionised morning TV in the early 1990s.
He lives with his girlfriend, French actress Jeanne Marine, at his home in Faversham, Kent, dealing part-time in art and antique furniture. One acquaintance has called him "an unlikely kind of Lovejoy character".
When Mary Robinson stepped down as President in 1997 and Geldof was asked about the possibility of him running as a candidate, he seriously considered the possibility.
So when the current President's term ends it is not inconceivable that we will be given a chance to elect him as the only Irish head of state in history who has musician as his occupation on his passport. Then we'd see some real fireworks.