The luck of the Irish

The battle for Manchester United - which has pitched Sir Alex Ferguson against the ruthless Irish tycoons John Magnier and JP McManus - has thrown the spotlight on the power of the emerald pound. William Cash reports on who's who in the Paddy pack ...

Until last November, the names of Irish multimillionaires likely to register on Londoners' radar were the Guinness clan, Bono and Eddie Jordan. That all changed when Sir Alex Ferguson issued a writ against John Magnier, the elusive Irish multimillionaire owner of the Coolmore Stud in Tipperary. Suddenly, the Irish super-rich were news.

The Coolmore clique of Magnier and JPMcManus, plus financier Dermot Desmond (who owns a controlling interest in Celtic), aren't the only ones to be making their presence known. As Ireland has prospered since joining the EU, so has a new breed of Irish tycoon epitomised by Sir Tony O'Reilly (ex-chief of Heinz turned media baron), Michael O'Leary (CEO of Ryanair) and the Smurfit family (cardboard packaging).

When in London, you will find this new generation of Irish super-rich gargling down Cheval Blanc at Les Ambassadeurs casino, the Dorchester Club and Motcomb's in Belgravia. With their art collections, exclusive country clubs, accounts with corporate detectives Kroll to do their business 'dirty work', private jets, Gatsby-style mansions in Barbados and celebrity friends ranging from Sean Connery to Chris De Burgh, the new Blarney billionaires are as colourful and glamorous as Colin Farrell.

In 2002, the £2 million wedding of John Magnier's eldest daughter Katie to a young horse trainer was described in Irish gossip columns as the 'greatest party thrown in Ireland for a decade'. The cabaret singers were Rod Stewart and Ronan Keating, and guests included Middle Eastern sheiks, the Sangster clan, Lord Lloyd Webber and one Sir Alex Ferguson.

As Sir Alex now knows, these Irish tycoons are very determined. A well-known London business figure told me: 'They are obsessed with winning - everything.'

Unsurprisingly, having conquered Ireland, many of these new corporate tycoons have found the Emerald Isle too small. But are we ready to welcome the inner circle of Ireland's new super-rich to London? Here is a form guide to Ireland's richest players and punters.

Few had heard of the 55-year-old bloodstock agent, known in Ireland simply as 'the boss', until Sir Alex Ferguson issued his writ for £100 million over the stud earnings of Rock of Gibraltar (the racehorse that Ferguson owns a half-share of with Coolmore).

Magnier's Christmas is spent playing golf at the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados (which he part-owns with JP McManus and Dermot Desmond) with his wife Sue, daughter of the Irish trainer Vincent O'Brien. Magnier stays at his luxury home, a short walk from the hotel and so large it is known locally as 'Gatwick'.

He had his son John Paul (one of five children) christened at the Vatican by the Pope. A close friend of former Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey, he now controls the £150 million Coolmore empire, which owns 100 or so of the most valuable stallions in the world and has studs in Australia, Kentucky and Tipperary, where Magnier also has a 2,000-acre country estate.

Magnier has a reputation for being calm, with a ruthless gambler's instinct and unflappable nerve. The son of an Irish horse breeder, Magnier was forced to drop out of Glenstal Abbey, Limerick, aged 16, to help his mother run the family farm when his father died.

In the Seventies he set up Coolmore Stud with his father-in-law Vincent O'Brien, ex-fighter pilot Tim Vigors and his Cheshire-based owner-trainer-gambler friend, Pools heir Robert Sangster. The formula was simple: buy future champions as yearlings, train them into winners and then sell their services as stallions. In one year alone, one prize stallion, Sadler's Wells, covered 163 mares at £120,000 a time. 'Magnier is like Kerry Packer and Bernie Ecclestone rolled into one,' says a friend. 'You don't mess with him.'

His fortune is listed at £230 million, but that is a conservative estimate. However, such are the laws in Ireland that stud earnings are not subject to tax. That suits Magnier just fine.

McManus: pro punter

Known as 'JP' or 'The Sundance Kid', McManus is a 52-year-old former bookmaker turned gambler who is the most fearless punter in Ireland. Bookies have been known to flee when they see him near their stand, about to place a six-figure cash bet.

Born with a brilliant mathematical mind, he has turned his gambling prowess into a multimillion-dollar business, playing the foreign exchange markets from his office near Geneva. He belongs to the world's most exclusive punters' club, a £3 billion foreign exchange syndicate set up by the Bahamas-based financier Joe Lewis.

Along with his close business colleague Magnier, McManus owns over 25 per cent of Manchester United, their shareholding vehicle being the British Virgin Islands-registered company Cubic Expression. Fiercely loyal to Magnier, he is said to be determined to see Ferguson put up the white flag in his feud with Coolmore.

The size of his fortune is unknown but it is thought to be over half a billion euros. When Ireland needed a new sports stadium, JP stepped in and wrote a cheque.

Nobody would say that JP was Ireland's greatest wit. He doesn't say much and with his frame, curly black hair and heavy overcoats, he has been likened to the 'third son of a country priest'.

McManus is now building up his business interests in Britain. One project is the redevelopment of the recently acquired Jackdaws Castle in the Cotswolds as a luxury hotel and training centre for his horses and jockeys. Jackdaws is a convenient hack from Cheltenham racecourse where JP always takes a box overlooking the winning post.

Although he lives in Switzerland, Limerick remains very much his spiritual home. His annual charity golf tournament, the JP McManus Invitational Pro-Am, held near Limerick, sees the JP phenomenon in full tilt. Golfers from Tiger Woods to David Duval play for free with celebrities such as Sean Connery, and afterwards there is a charity auction in which one year Mike Tabor bid £500,000 for a cartoon by Peter Curling.

Unlike some of his fellow super-rich who enjoy more than a tipple, JP is teetotal. He is married to Noreen, a Catholic girl with whom he has three children - John, 25, an amateur jockey who is expected to ride one of his father's 100 or so horses at Cheltenham next month, Sue-Ann, 23, and Kieran, 22. McManus has a nine-bedroom house at his 400-acre Martinstown stud farm which he helped to build in 1970 before he got rich - in his previous life he drove a JCB digger owned by his father.

He began his gambling career loitering around the local Limerick betting shop, and now his famous green-and-gold racing stripes are a wellknown sight at Cheltenham. But don't expect JP to be seen sporting a Manchester United scarf any time soon, despite being the biggest shareholder - he supports Arsenal.

Desmond: flashy financier

Known as Dermo or 'the Kaiser', the 53-year-old Irish financier is in many ways the most fascinating and colourful of the Irish billionaires. He personifies the new breed of gambler tycoon, whether playing celebrity golf for high stakes or the currency markets.

As with McManus and Magnier, he is also a shareholder of Manchester United, although his stake is only around three per cent (£7.6 million), partly because he already has a 26 per cent controlling interest in Celtic.

Two years ago, Irish society was shocked to learn that the financier, who maintains homes in Ireland, Monaco, Gibraltar and London, had a secret son by his Ayrshire-born mistress, Donna Taylor, whom he met when she was an air stewardess on the private jet of his close friend JP McManus. Understandably, the news of the secret love child - which was splashed over various newspapers - put a heavy strain on his marriage to Mary, his wife of 25 years.

In the end Desmond chose to stay with his wife and keep his estimated £700 million fortune intact. Whether he has got over his mid-life crisis is unclear, although he once said: 'There's nothing good about getting older. I wish I was 30 again. The only thing that ages well is wine.'

Also a member of the highly secretive Joe Lewis foreign-currency-exchange syndicate, Desmond started his financial career as a stockbroker in London before going on to shake up Dublin's financial district in the Eighties with his own firm of stockbrokers. He was also the driving force behind a new international financial services centre located in Dublin's old docks.

Another close associate of Charles Haughey, Desmond has always had a sharp eye for a bargain. He picked up London's City airport in 1995 for a mere £23.5 million; it is now worth £245 million. Other airport investments include a stake worth £20 million in TBI, which operates Luton and Belfast airports.

He likes to bet thousands on every hole when he plays his fellow 'mafia' members at golf, and even devised a special set of rules so that he could beat Tiger Woods in a match played for a

When in Ireland, he lives with his second wife, Chryss Goulandris large bet. He persuaded Woods to play him with a ruling that decreed that both players would play two balls on each hole, with Desmond allowed to play the better of his two balls while Tiger played his worst. Tiger lost.

A former tennis partner of George Bush Snr while he was the chief executive and later chairman of Heinz Corporation of America, Sir Tony O'Reilly, 67, has come a long way since his days as a former Irish and British Lions rugby player.

(herself worth £512 million thanks to her share of the Goulandris Greek shipping fortune), at Castlemartin, his Georgian mansion outside Dublin.

O'Reilly: media magnate

O'Reilly, now a media mogul (he has a 26.4 per cent stake in Independent News & Media valued at $500 million) and controlling stakes, with his wife, in Waterford Wedgwood, has been called the world's 'most celebrated Irishman'; his notoriety as one of Ireland's richest men - his fortune is thought to be over £1,000 million --was not dented in 1996 when he bid £1.75 million for the engagement ring Onassis gave to Jackie. Such an audacious gesture is typical O'Reilly. In purchasing the Onassis ring, O'Reilly not only cemented his position as a serious player in the world of big business, but also put Ireland back on the glamour map. He topped this in 2000 when he bought Monet's Le Portail (Soleil) at Sotheby's for $24 million.

Much of O'Reilly's drive and capacity for reinvention comes from the fact that he is illegitimate - though he only found out about this when he was told by Jesuit priests at his school, Belvedere College. His father, he learned, had a secret wife and family. Through hard work, and probably a fevered effort to reinvent himself, he won a scholarship to read law at University College, Dublin, where his rugby caught the attention of the Irish selectors. From his rugby success, he moved into the food business, first making his name in the Sixties when he rebranded Ireland's dairy butter, Kerrygold. In 1969 he made the gamble of his career when he was offered a job by the Irish government but instead went to work for Heinz in England. Within four years he had moved to Pittsburgh to run the global Heinz empire, becoming CEO in 1979 and chairman a decade later.

His first wife, Sue Cameron, was an Australian whom he met through his rugby career. They have six children, each of whom, Murdoch-style, has been put in charge of a part of the O'Reilly empire. The couple divorced in 1990; O'Reilly married Chryss Goulandris a year later. All his children by Cameron are currently well-entrenched on the A-lists of London and Dublin. It was O'Reilly who helped the Duchess of York with her overdraft difficulties, paying her handsomely to be a spokesperson for WeightWatchers in America. Fergie has also been to stay at O'Reilly's mansion in the Bahamas.

His son Gavin runs Independent News & Media in Dublin, and is married to the Irish actress Alison Doody, who appeared in one of the Indiana Jones movies; his eldest daughter Susan, educated at Oxford and Yale, is married to City financier Tarik Wildman; another son, Tony O'Reilly Jnr --currently going through a divorce --who was educated at Brown in America, runs Wedgwood in Staffordshire. His son Cameron is chief executive of O'Reilly's Australian press holdings company, APN, and another daughter, Caroline, is married to the Irish supermarket butcher Andrew Dempsey.