The journey from Mullingar to Clongowes Wood College in Clane, County Kildare, takes just over an hour and a half, but when the thirteen-year-old Michael O’Leary set off for his new boarding school on a bright September day in 1974, he was entering a different world. In the 1970s, well before the economic boom that would create a new class of Irish wealthy, Clongowes was the school of choice for Ireland’s well-to-do rural professionals and farmers, its dormitories filled with the sons of doctors, dentists, accountants and landowners, most of whom hailed from the nearby counties.
‘The funny thing about Clongowes [is that] it is now a school for the rich and famous – multimillionaires’ sons go to Clongowes,’ says O’Leary. ‘When we were there nobody was there. The year I left and my brother was still there [Sir Anthony] O’Reilly put two kids in for fifth and sixth forms and suddenly there was someone famous there. And Anto comes in the helicopter and lands on the under-thirteen pitch. It wasn’t that kind of a [posh] place. There was no rich list in the 1970s. If you stood out for anything in Clongowes, except for rugby, you learned fairly quickly to stop standing out.’
Despite the perils of standing out at Clongowes, the school has many famous past pupils, including James Joyce; John Bruton, a farmer’s son who would become prime minister of Ireland and the EU’s ambassador to the United States; Paul McGuinness, an O’Leary contemporary and the son of a soldier who became manager of U2, Ireland’s most successful rock band; and David Dilger, the chief executive of Greencore, one of Ireland’s largest food companies.
Founded in 1814, Clongowes was the first Jesuit college for boys in Ireland, and its mission was to inculcate the Jesuit tradition in the thousands of boys who would enter its gates in the years to come. The pupils, privileged because of their families’ relative wealth, would nonetheless be taught about their responsibilities to their communities and to God. Sport, particularly rugby and tennis, was an essential part of the formula.
O’Leary’s first sight of Clongowes’ impressive nineteenth-century buildings and grounds had come the previous year in 1973 when, as a gauche twelve-year-old who knew little of life outside Mullingar, he was brought to visit the school by his parents. ‘I’ll never forget the first time the parents took me around Clongowes. It had football pitches, soccer pitches, it had a swimming pool and tennis courts and I thought this was heaven. I had never seen a place that had so many sports facilities. I was delighted to go there. I didn’t miss home in the least.’
In that, O’Leary was fortunate. Boarders rarely left the school during the term, with visits restricted to a few Sundays in the year and one weekend break at home for half-term. O’Leary settled in quickly, making friends who would stay with him for the rest of his life and participating enthusiastically, if rarely successfully, in as much sport as he could manage.
‘Basketball and cricket were the only ones I didn’t play,’ he says. ‘I hated cricket, couldn’t understand bloody basketball but then I was about four foot nothing so for basketball I was kind of physically challenged. I was more likely to have been the ball. But I tried hard. So I finished up on most of the teams except for the rugby. I was tiny on the rugby pitch so I finished up on the super thirds for rugby, which was for the plodders.’
Academically O’Leary was an average student, never pushing himself too hard, but never struggling to make his grades. ‘If you were in the top ten per cent you were a swot; if you were in the bottom ten per cent you were a moron, and much better off to be in the middle…In a fucked-up way, I was nobody in school,’ O’Leary says. ‘I was common Joe Soap. I’m still common Joe Soap, I just got lucky a couple of times.’
His one area of success, school friends claim, was in cross country running. ‘He was small, but he was gritty,’ says one contemporary, ‘and he could just keep running.’
While O’Leary settled into Clongowes, his father was trying to bounce back from the collapse of Tailteann. While the receivers would not be called in until 1976, the business had been dead in the water since 1973 and the elder O’Leary had already launched a new venture before Michael went to his new school. In February 1974, eight months before young Michael went to Clongowes, he had applied for planning permission to build a new factory on a one-acre site in Ballinagore, not far from Ballinagore House where he had lived briefly some thirteen years earlier. The locals, however, were not impressed.
O’Leary wanted to build a rendering plant – a factory that processes animal carcasses to produce bonemeal, tallow and other animal by-products. Rendering is a useful activity, but for those unfortunate enough to live close to a factory, it has one major drawback: it produces a foul smell. Three hundred residents organized a protest meeting against O’Leary’s plans in April 1974. According to the Westmeath Examiner, O’Leary spoke to the protestors, congratulated them on the concern for their local area, but warned them they would regret blocking his initiative. Their determined resistance, however, forced O’Leary to withdraw his plans and apply instead for permission to build his factory near Castlepollard, a small town towards the Cavan border. The prospect of jobs in a community that had few was enough to quell any misgivings about the business.
‘At the start they employed twenty-five or thirty people in Castlepollard, which was a godsend because in the 70s there was no one else giving employment, except for one other major employer outside of Castlepollard,’ says Donie Cassidy.
One of Timothy O’Leary’s earliest customers was Albert Reynolds, whose family owned C&D Foods, a pet food company. Philip Reynolds, who now runs the business, has three lasting impressions of O’Leary as a businessman. ‘One: he was a difficult man to deal with, always considered himself to be the expert and never wrong. He would not accept criticism of either his service or his product. Two: he knew the value of a pound and never accepted damaged or spoilt credit notes, and he made it his business to find a reason to visit around the time for payment and so collected his dues in person. And three: he was always looking for an angle, trying to be better, to do things different and do more and more business.’
Albert Reynolds too remembers O’Leary as ‘a tough man in business, but he was very entertaining and I used to enjoy his company’.
The new factory, called Lickbla, was not the end of O’Leary’s entrepreneurship. He was an avid property developer – ‘He was always developing property, always buying and selling properties, and he was good at it,’ says Michael – and he was prepared to try anything. He also dabbled in herbal remedies and in rabbits. ‘He was commercially producing rabbits for the skins and rabbit meat,’ says Michael. ‘I didn’t know where the rabbits were going; I was quite young. I remember all the white rabbits though. He’d kill them, I guess. That was what you would do with them…My father always had about three or four different businesses. He was brilliant at setting up businesses, crap at running them. So he’d set it up and run it for a couple of years, and then lose it. And he lost three or four. And looking back on it, the genius of the guy was that he was able to set up three or four different businesses in different industries. He was an entrepreneur in the true sense.’
In Clongowes O’Leary was shielded from the vagaries of his father’s businesses and he has no memory of the Lickbla protests. He spent his days studying and playing sports, but as he grew older he found that there were two things missing from his idyllic world. ‘For about six years I never saw a girl, and you couldn’t drink alcohol,’ he told an audience of students at an Irish university in 2005.
But when he entered fifth year, aged seventeen, all that changed. ‘Up until then it had been all boys, with not a hint of a female within 5,000 miles of us,’ he says with typical exaggeration. ‘But when you got to fifth and sixth year there was a dance twice a year with the Dominican convent, Wicklow, and with Our Lady’s convent in Rathnew, both of which have since been closed down. Everybody loved the dances.’
For the Clongowes boys and the convent girls, the dances represented a symbolic rite of passage. Sophistication, however, was not the order of the day. ‘Talcum powder and Brut [the aftershave of choice for teenage boys in the 1970s] was as far as we got. I have no idea what we used to wear – jeans I would imagine,’ O’Leary says.
The dances, like the rugby matches, were organized on a home-and-away basis, with the home dances taking place in the Clongowes concert hall.
‘It was like a cattle mart,’ says one of O’Leary’s contemporaries. ‘The music would start, the lights would go down, and off you’d go. You’d be praying for the lights to go down, but it was always the usual suspects who ended up with the girls. Invariably the rugby captain ended up with the best-looking girl.’
The pubescent O’Leary found it a daunting experience. ‘It was fellas in one corner, girls in the other corner,’ he says. ‘It was like getting fifty fellas who’d been left in the desert for three months and showing them what the water table looked like…The sad thing was that in those days you couldn’t miss, but the problem was that you didn’t realize at the time that you couldn’t miss. So we all went to the socials absolutely shitting ourselves, cos you had to snog one. If you didn’t snog at a social you were gay. And there was no greater crime in Clongowes. But what we didn’t realize was the girls were probably under as much pressure as we were, so you couldn’t miss.’ Plenty did, however.
Surprisingly, the priests and nuns took a back seat during the rituals. ‘There was no one going around with a torch, though there would have been a patrol to make sure that you didn’t disappear down to the gym hall,’ says the contemporary.
If the dances were the social highlight for boys who spent the rest of their school lives in each other’s company, rugby was the dominant passion. Under the leadership of Greg Dilger, now a stockbroker in Dublin, the Clongowes senior team was developing into a talented unit that would surprise the bigger Dublin schools in 1978 by winning the coveted Schools Cup for the first time in fifty years. Each match was an opportunity for the school to decamp to Dublin to cheer on its heroes, culminating in the triumph at Lansdowne Road on St Patrick’s Day, when Dilger’s team defeated Terenure College 19–6 in front of a crowd of more than 20,000.
Clongowes would repeat its cup victory four times in the years to come. Its success on the rugby field would change the perception of the school, and subtly change the nature of its pupils. While still the choice of the rural professional, Clongowes would also start to attract more and more of the children of Dublin’s wealthy Catholic elite. Thirty years later Clongowes is Ireland’s most exclusive private school; the largesse of its parents has delivered new buildings and a new state-of-the-art rugby pitch, now used by the Irish national rugby squad for training sessions.
In the summer of 1979 O’Leary was free: free from Clongowes, where he had spent most of the previous five years, free to experiment with girls, and free to drink as much as he could manage. He had applied himself to his Leaving Certificate examination and got a respectable set of results that allowed him to accept a place at Trinity College Dublin to study ESS – economics and social studies, the precursor of the modern business studies degree. But first he went to work. That summer was spent behind the bar at the Greville Arms Hotel in Mullingar.
Frank McKee, who was the manager of the hotel, remembers a confident young man he thought was destined to do well and to whom he recommended a career in tourism. O’Leary, though, had made up his mind to study business, and had opted for Trinity College over the more traditional choice, for Clongowes boys, of University College Dublin. Trinity, the older of Dublin’s two universities of the time, was perceived to be the Protestant college, even though the vast majority of its students were Catholic. This sectarian perception of Trinity had been copper-fastened by John Charles McQuaid, Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin from 1940 to 1972, who had instructed his co-religionists not to attend Trinity because of its Protestant ethos.
‘It was always going to be Dublin,’ recalls O’Leary. ‘Everybody in Clongowes, all my pals, they were all going to Dublin. And it was only an hour from Mullingar. So it was only a question of would I go to Trinity or UCD. I chose Trinity. I just thought Trinity was cool and UCD was all industrial.’ At the time Trinity students referred to UCD as a polytechnic, a derogatory term for a third-level college that did not share its sense of history or achievement.
In late September 1979 O’Leary arrived in Dublin to take up his place at the college. Michael likes to portray himself as an irresponsible student who spent his undergraduate years drinking and chasing girls. ‘I did get a degree,’ he told Eamon Dunphy in a television interview in 2003, in response to an inaccurate suggestion that he had dropped out of Trinity. ‘In drinking, rugby and chasing girls, although I wasn’t much good at that.’
‘I learned absolutely squat about business,’ he told students at the University of Limerick in 2005. ‘I’ll never forget, in Trinity they had this idea that we would read a lot around the subject and lectures, but the theory was that if they put industrial relations on at nine o’clock on a Monday and nine o’clock on a Tuesday we’d all show up nice and early. And if they put statistics on at five o’clock on a Thursday and Friday they’d keep us there till the end of the week. So of course we blew off Mondays and Tuesdays and we blew off Thursdays and Fridays and basically we fucked off around the centre of Dublin. So I learned very little in Trinity.’
For O’Leary’s first year in the big city he moved into Hatch Hall, a Jesuit boarding house on the same street as the maternity hospital where he had been born. It was a ten-minute stroll from the Trinity campus; it was also less than a hundred yards from Hartigan’s public house, situated just off St Stephen’s Green, which would become O’Leary’s local for the next four years. ‘We went mad when we left school and went to college, everybody went mad. We were released out of a boarding school after six years, you couldn’t help yourself,’ he says.
O’Leary’s madness was of the predictable kind. He and his friends, many of whom had chosen to study at UCD, would gather at Hartigan’s, or the Pavilion bar in Trinity, which overlooked the college playing fields, or in the seedier surroundings of Trinity’s canteen bar – a modern, bomb-shelter-like structure that sat incongruously to the side of the college’s elegant Front Square. Early evenings in the pubs were followed by later sessions in Old Belvedere rugby club, ‘and then there’d normally be a party in someone’s house. It was fantastic, without a doubt the best fuck-up years of my life were in Trinity.’
Paying for the student lifestyle was not a problem. O’Leary received thirty pounds a week from his parents – a lavish stipend at the time – and also worked on Friday and Saturday nights in a hotel owned by his uncle, Noel O’Callaghan. O’Leary worked the late shift, from eight in the evening until four in the morning, serving drinks in the nightclub after the main bar had closed.
The cash he earned and the money he received from his parents allowed him to save. While most of his contemporaries were struggling with debts, O’Leary claims to have accumulated £5,000 during his college years. ‘It wasn’t that hard, actually,’ he told a reporter for the Sunday Business Post in March 2001. ‘My parents gave me the pocket money, and every time I saw the uncles and aunts they’d slip you a fiver too. I was rolling in it, to be honest.’
His network of friends slowly extended beyond his schoolmates. None had joined him in ESS, the course he had chosen to study, though a few had gone to Trinity. ‘You had two groups of pals,’ he says. ‘The ones you went to school with – most of whom were in UCD – and another group in Trinity.’ Invariably, the new friends came from similar backgrounds, and similar schools, like Glenstal, a boarding school near Limerick run by Benedictine monks, or Dublin’s fee-paying Catholic schools.
A dutiful son, O’Leary found time to visit his parents in Mullingar, travelling home on the train until he solved his commuting problems by buying his first car, a purple Mini. ‘Best car I ever drove,’ he says. ‘It was a babe magnet – not because it was a great car, but because you were one of the few people in college who actually had a car, even if it was a Mini. Our record was fifteen people one night, going to a twenty-first party in Howth. There were four of them sitting on the roof. And we drove from Trinity to Howth [in north Dublin, a twenty-minute journey]. You wouldn’t fucking do it now, you’d be arrested long before you got there.’
O’Leary’s summers were spent working in Mullingar. By now an accomplished barman, O’Leary plied his trade in the local hotel. He was one of the few students lucky enough to get work in his hometown. Ireland remained economically depressed. Most of his contemporaries went abroad each summer, working on building sites across Europe or travelling further afield to the United States to accumulate money for the following year, but O’Leary’s skills as a barman ensured there was always a job waiting in Mullingar.
‘I liked bar work; it was good fun, good money. I was good at it,’ he says. ‘I was fast, I’d get the drinks in and out. If you were good at it you’d go in in the evenings – I couldn’t stand around all afternoon doing a shift from two till eleven at night. A lot of these places would want extra bar staff for nightwork, so I’d work the evening shift from six till maybe three in the morning. You’d get extra into your hand for working the nightclubs.’
O’Leary made his final break from the Jesuits when he moved from Hatch Hall into an apartment owned by his parents – another luxury denied most college students in 1980 – which he shared with his two oldest sisters. It was free, but it had its drawbacks. ‘I couldn’t bring back girls, but anyway I was useless with girls. I’d chase all day and catch nothing. Girls were the target in Trinity, they weren’t friends. There were one or two but it was all very innocent in those days.’