Denis O’Brien has a colourful turn of phrase. More often than not his comments get him headlines – see his recent comments about “entitled” graduates and “weak” human resources professionals – but sometimes they get him in trouble, as was the case with his claim that “Sinn Féin/IRA certainly got the report they paid for”. A jury found last Friday that the statement was defamatory of two lawyers commissioned by Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan to write a report on media ownership in Ireland in 2016.
Here are some of his best one-liners down the years.
- “Modern-day digital colonialism”: O’Brien’s description of the channelling by multinationals of their profits from Africa to Ireland to cut their tax bills at the expense of their African customers, as told to a conference in Dublin organised earlier this month by the Business Post.
- “Philanthrocapitalism”: Not his own word but one he uses regularly to describe the market-based, capitalist, for-profit approach to solving the world’s most important issues.
- “Facebook’s launderette”: A comment – made during a 2021 lecture in memory of late Fianna Fáil Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan jnr at the University of Cambridge – about the relationship between Ireland and Facebook, which has its European headquarters here.
- “Holocaust that went on for 300 years”: O’Brien’s December 2023 description of the transatlantic slave trade. He supports campaigns for the UK and other former colonial powers to apologise and pay repatriations.
- “Conquistador capitalist”: O’Brien told the Guardian in a 2011 interview that “there is no point in being a conquistador capitalist ... The conquistador was a robber ... I hope that when I die no one will say I was a robber.” This was in reference to his significant contribution to rebuilding Haiti after a catastrophic earthquake. O’Brien took $1.9 billion of dividends between 2007 and 2015 from Digicel, his mobile phone business that has significant operations in Haiti. His stake was reduced to 10 per cent in a restructuring last year.
- “Silver chicken”: A facetious reference to his £20 million Gulfstream jet which he got around the time he sold Esat Telecom to British Telecom in 2000. He got more than €300 million for his stake in Esat and cut his tax bill by a reported €57 million by moving to Portugal. He subsequently became tax resident in Malta.
- “The ill-informed jumping on the bandwagon”: O’Brien’s take – in a 2003 interview with The Irish Times – on a thinly veiled attack on tax exiles by the chairman of the Small Firms Association.
- “In regard to my residency, I can live anywhere in the world and nobody is going to stop me”: Same as above.
- “We are fast turning into a communist state, we are fast moving towards a communist doctrine. People in this country should be thankful for what has been achieved in the last 10 years”: From the same interview. A reference to the public’s lack of gratitude for economic progress and what he saw as a pervasive negative attitude towards politicians, government and entrepreneurs.
- “John Delaney could run Uefa easily. He could run Fifa as far as I’m concerned ... certainly better than Sepp Blatter. And more honestly”: This 2014 comment predated Delaney’s departure from the Football Association of Ireland in 2019 under a cloud of controversy.
- “Dunkirk without the ships”: His pithy analysis of Brexit delivered at Davos in 2018, where he also predicted the Dublin office-market bubble.
- “Ragbag of investments”: Another zinger from his 2003 The Irish Times interview. It was a reference to the holdings of Tony O’Reilly who chaired the Valentia Consortium that beat O’Brien’s eIsland to buy Eircom in 2001. The investments included Independent News & Media (INM) whose papers made “outrageous allegations against me and my company”. O’Brien became the largest shareholder in INM 2010, wresting control from the O’Reillys.
- “She said to me: ‘Denis, you have been brilliant with your investments but I have a few words for you ... Indo, Indo, Indo’”: A reference to his wife Catherine’s take on the estimated €400 million he lost on his investment in Independent News and Media, made at a 2009 seminar in Dublin on entrepreneurship.
- “A skip of defamatory allegations”: O’Brien’s description of the Sunday Business Post article in 2015 giving details of a 2008 report by accountants PwC into Ireland’s banks. O’Brien sued, claiming the article portrayed him as one of the “developer kings” who destroyed the country and bankrupted its banking system. He lost the action after the jury decided the article did not mean what he claimed it did.
- “One and one together and getting 20”: O’Brien’s 2001 description of the Moriarty tribunal’s inquiry into the financial details behind his purchase of a £150,000 (€190,000) house in Marbella in Spain. O’Brien bought a house in Spain from the late David Austin in 1996. Austin transferred £147,000 (€186,000) to an account in the Isle of Man which belonged to Michael Lowry the same year. The tribunal concluded in 2011 that Lowry “secured the winning” of the State’s second mobile phone licence for Denis O’Brien’s company, Esat Digifone. It also found Lowry, a former Fine Gael minister, was given payments of £447,000 (€567,000) – including the Austin payment - by O’Brien and that he had also facilitated a loan to the TD of £420,000 (€533,000). The payments were “demonstrably referable” to O’Brien’s winning of the licence, according to the Tribunal. Lowry and O’Brien have repeatedly disputed the findings.
- “The media are like hyenas. They are looking out for bad news. It’s self perpetuating”: From a 2009 speech.
It is unlikely he has changed his mind since.
